Liam Neeson’s Ireland-Based Action Flick Storms Back Into Netflix’s Top 10, Three Years Later
Streaming charts have a funny way of resurrecting movies nobody expected to hear about again, and this week that honor belongs to a Liam Neeson action thriller that barely made a dent in theaters. Action fans searching for something gritty and grounded have apparently found exactly what they wanted, and the algorithm noticed fast.
Netflix subscribers have quietly turned an overlooked 2023 release into one of the platform’s biggest comeback stories of the year. The film in question keeps popping up on trending lists, and viewers who missed it the first time around are now bingeing it in droves, proving that a strong word of mouth push can still resurrect a flop years later.
That film is In the Land of Saints and Sinners, which recently landed at No. 2 on Netflix’s Top 10 movies chart in the United States, according to a widely shared X breakdown of the platform’s weekly rankings. The film sits just behind The Last House, a heavily promoted Netflix original horror movie starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, and comfortably ahead of titles like ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ and ‘Minions.’
Neeson stars as a weary hitman pulled out of retirement for one final job when an IRA bomber on the run turns up in his quiet Irish village. His character, Finbar Murphy, is trying to leave his violent past behind in the small town of Glencolmcille when local crime boss Robert McQue, played by Colm Meaney, drags him back into the fold. Things escalate when Murphy discovers a young girl has been abused by a former IRA member hiding out in town, setting him on a collision course with IRA boss Doireann McCann, played by Kerry Condon.
The cast leans heavily into Irish talent, with Oscar nominees Kerry Condon of ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ and Ciarán Hinds of ‘Belfast’ joining Jack Gleeson and Colm Meaney. Robert Lorenz, who previously worked with Neeson on ‘The Marksman,’ directs from a script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.
What makes the resurgence notable is how quietly the film underperformed the first time around. The movie earned just 1 million dollars domestically on its opening weekend from an 896 theater release, finishing with roughly 3.3 million dollars worldwide, numbers that would normally bury a movie for good. Critics disagreed with that verdict at the time, and the film currently holds an 83 percent critics score and a 74 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, officially making it one of Neeson’s highest rated action thrillers.
The comeback isn’t limited to the United States either, since FlixPatrol data shows the film trending at number one in more than a dozen countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. That kind of global spread suggests this isn’t a fluke algorithm bump but a genuine audience discovery moment playing out across multiple markets at once.
For a movie that was written off as a box office footnote in 2023, this second life on streaming is the kind of validation most Neeson thrillers never get. Are you finally checking out ‘In the Land of Saints and Sinners’ now that it’s dominating your Netflix homepage, or were you already ahead of the curve?
