Ron Halpern

Ron Halpern’s name kinda pops up if you’ve ever lost an afternoon watching action flicks. The guy’s fingerprints are all over some wild rides, and, honestly, it’s easy to see why. With Bastille Day (2016), you’re thrown right into the chaos of Paris, where a pickpocket and a CIA agent—played by Idris Elba, oozing cool as always—team up in this frantic chase after a bomb goes off. It’s not just car chases and moody city shots, though, there’s this undercurrent of political messiness that feels a little too close to real life sometimes. Flip back a couple years to Non-Stop (2014) and you’re up in the air, literally. Liam Neeson doing the whole “grizzled hero but with a haunted past” thing, this time as an air marshal who has to figure out which passenger is sending him threatening texts. The whole movie is basically a pressure cooker, and every time you think it’s about to calm down—boom, another twist. Feels like Halpern’s got a thing for tossing characters into impossible situations and watching sparks fly. Then there’s Unknown (2011), which is basically Liam Neeson again, but this time he wakes up from a coma and suddenly everyone’s pretending he doesn’t exist. Identity, paranoia, Berlin’s cold gray streets—it’s a trip. Halpern’s projects don’t mess around with subtlety, but sometimes you just want a movie to grab you by the collar. If you’re into thrillers that don’t really give you a chance to catch your breath, yeah, these three show Halpern knows how to keep things moving.