Back at the end of January 2009, the deep thinkers at Fox took a little action movie nobody had paid all that much attention to and dropped it into the barren winter wastelands where movies the studios have no faith in normally go to die. This one didn't. The suits would like you to think they planned it all out this way but really they just got lucky. That film was Taken, a solid little action thriller starring Liam Neeson that took advantage of the relatively weak release slate around it to make big bags of money and become one of the year's surprise hits.

So Fox getting wealthier was one consequence of this lucky move. Another was a surprising number of people who should have known better acting all shocked and surprised that Liam Neeson could carry an action film.

Why should they have known better? Well, here's the thing... while it was his part in 1993's Schindler's List that propelled Neeson to household name status, the man had actually been working steadily since the late '70s. And for every post-Schindler serious drama role like Kinsey there was a pre-Schindler role like Darkman. Or Krull. Or Excalibur.

This confusion over Neeson as an action star was just baffling to me. He'd been a crusader in Kingdom of Heaven just four years before. His bit in Gangs of New York ain't exactly soft and pretty. Hell... even with the film itself being a horrible piece of junk, Neeson played probably the greatest on-screen Jedi ever in The Phantom Menace.

I've come to the conclusion that most of the confusion came from people having been bombarded with -- and ultimately accepting -- the 1980s and 1990s definition of an action hero, one in which the hero must be some sort of prime physical specimen in order to exude manliness. But if you took Stallone and Schwarzenegger out of the mix you know what I think would have happened? I think Neeson would have been the biggest action star of those decades. I think he'd have filled the rugged alpha-male space somewhere between Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood -- he even co-starred with the latter in a Dirty Harry film -- with occasional forays into Steve McQueen territory. Neeson, you see, is The Man -- it's just that we were too distracted by Arnold's pecs to notice.

What brought this on? Well, slightly more than two years after the release of Taken, Warner Brothers are hoping to repeat what worked for Fox back then and they're dropping a Neeson-starring action picture into the barren wastes of February in the form of Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown. It's probably going to work, too. I'm in Berlin right now where the film is premiering as part of the massive Berlinale Film Festival and the people who have seen it pretty much seem to love it. There's some stiffer competition than Taken faced in the form of I Am Number Four, but while that's all well and good for the kids I'd rather watch a grown up do his thing.