A Neesonsploitation flick making it to cinemas, at a time when cinema turnout is lower than it’s been in years, might be the least surprising thing to happen in 2020. But quite frankly… well, I’ve been spending all day on festival detail for FilmInk, and I’m in the mood for something simple. Something to get me out of the house (with a mask and adhering to social distancing; I’m a workaholic, not an idiot) and away from my computer for a couple hours. Now, I'm going to try and be fair with this, and judge it on the same metric as all the other Neeson flicks I've reviewed, but as I'll get into, even that isn't going to do this film any favours.
Neeson is doing his Neeson thing, playing another blue-collar worker with a specially-trained past, only this time, he’s a safe cracker who gets screwed over by crooked feds when he tries to turn himself in. Wouldn’t be the first time he tried to alleviate his guilty conscience and had it blow up in his face. Okay, dialling back the snark for a bit (hell, to be brutally honest, the situations are also mirrored in how he got done dirty for trying to come clean), he’s fine in the lead role… but when pitted against Jai Courtney, it is a hilariously one-sided fight. Had I not seen Courtney in Buffaloed recently, I would’ve completely thrown away the idea that he could play the bad guy properly these days, but that’s more a problem with the script than anything else.
My word, even for something as boilerplate as a Liam Neeson vehicle, this is some embarrassingly corny writing. Giving the token good cop a toy dog to play with was admittedly a good move (most memorable part of this film by far), but the meet-cute between Neeson and Kate Walsh with this weird role reversal at a self-storage store, Anthony Ramos playing out every crooked cop with a conscience ever (he literally says “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. No one was supposed to get hurt.”), Neeson literally explaining that he gave up robbing banks for love in those exact words… this is like store-brand The Old Man & The Gun, made by Bizarro David Lowery who thinks subtlety is a medical condition.
Walsh as the love interest in particular might be one of the worst I’ve seen all year, and much like with Courtney, that has nothing to do with Walsh herself. Instead, it’s to do with how she is so restricted as walking character motivation for Neeson that, whenever the plot somehow puts her in a different position, it’s like the writers got themselves stuck in a corner and freaked the fuck out. She ends up in the hospital between scenes, and then it’s like it never even happened for how much it affects her afterwards.
Okay, okay, enough talking about the extra shit in this basic action fluff; what about the shit someone would want out of a film like this? Well, to rub salt in the wound, the action is close to non-existent. For a film that barely scrapes in at 90 minutes before the end credits, the pacing is incredibly slack, with the script spending far more time with the simple morality play at work rather than building towards the action beats. Seeing Neeson count down from 10 was admittedly a cool moment (and one the writers must’ve been really proud of, since they had Walsh say “Wow” right after it), but it stands out like a blinding light in the fog of fuck-all that is the rest of the film. No tension, no intrigue, no effective pathos outside of a few moments from Neeson; it’s closer to a kitchen appliance than it is to an actual story.
And that’s pretty much the best thing I can say about it: It’s functional. For those who want more Neeson comfort food, I guess this works, but quite frankly, I question the point of watching this for even that much. It’s an action thriller with unmemorable action and barely any thrills, with one of the most cliched scripts I think I’ve ever covered on here (Mark Williams and Steve Allrich land on the shitlist for this one), and it’s not even the funny kind of bad that makes for good riff material. If only it qualified for that.
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