Yep. It’s another Liam Neeson movie. Only a couple months after the last one. But what ultimately made me check it out was how, upon reading up on it, I learnt that this isn’t just the latest Neesonsploitation flick. It is also an attempt to crossbreed the overused-set-of-skills of a modern Neeson B-movie… with a Clint Eastwood movie.
The influences are present both in front of and behind the camera. Director/co-writer Robert Lorenz has collaborated many times with Eastwood, either as producer or assistant director, and his only previous feature effort starred the man himself. Given one of those collabs was on Gran Torino, the narrative presented here makes sense, as it also involves a gravel-throated Vietnam veteran who forms a bond with a young kid and essentially tries to save him from the ‘bad seeds’ of his own cultural heritage.
It’s at this point I should also bring up how this matches with late-period Eastwood’s habit of injecting his own politics into the proceedings, as it pits Neeson’s Jim Hanson (because just calling him Cliff Westree would’ve been too obvious) against everyone’s favourite Mexican boogeymen: The cartels. Beyond how overused this version of Mexico is getting by this point, it’s quite telling when before Neeson himself, or even before the title, it’s the cartel thugs that we see first. Add to that some Second Amendment pandering that ventures into Eli Roth’s Death Wish territory at one point (in that its depiction of a 'responsible gun owner' is woefully misguided and tone-deaf), Neeson growling about how the government does nothing (such biting commentary(!)), and an on-screen conversation with an American flag literally draped over his shoulder, and you have a rather loud feature… when it can be bothered to get above a whisper.
Yeah, I may be derailing my own critique by bringing up the politics of the whole thing (although with how much that wound up annoying me with Richard Jewell, it’s hard not to notice in something like this), but that’s not even the main problem. That comes with how, while it shows a few stray ends of the Eastwood formula in its narrative, there’s none of the actual film craft to back it up. His narrative priorities may rub me the wrong way at times, but Eastwood knows how to put a film together; Gran Torino, Sully and even Richard Jewell (for as much as I fucking hate it) are evidence of that.
Lorenz, on the other hand? Not so much. It’s yet another action-thriller where both of those things are in short supply, coming across more like a buddy road trip movie with minimal laughs. Neeson tries to sell it as a rancher from the American South (even if he sounds about as Southern as Sean Boswell), but he’s given nothing to do. Even the title feels like an afterthought, as there’s remarkably little sharpshooting in this movie. We spend more time with Neeson and Jacob Perez discussing Pop Tarts than we do seeing Neeson shoot shit.
That might also be because all three credited writers, including Lorenz, haven’t actually written anything before this. I brought up Eastwood as an obvious reference point (up to and including having Neeson and Perez just watch Hang ‘Em High in a hotel room at one point), but there’s cribbing from a lot of other movies in this. There are two scenes involving dogs being killed to try and get some of John Wick’s cred (both of which have no real reason to be here in the first place; classy(!)), the fixation on cartels feels very Rambo: Last Blood, the attempts at neo-Western aesthetic occasionally lean into No Country For Old Men territory; this is less a story than it is the result of three people trying to remember the best parts of whatever movies they happened to have watched recently. To say nothing of its place as part of the Neeson B-movie assembly line, where every bit of his character has likely shown up elsewhere over the last decade.
I know this has become a recurring question with just about anything Liam Neeson stars in these days, but why does this movie exist? It’s an attempt to deviate from the usual Neeson formula, but only does so by ripping off someone else’s formula and leaving behind anything that made it even remotely interesting. Even if it didn’t release to cinemas during COVID lockdown, I still wouldn’t have been surprised to be the only person at that screening because that’s how non-essential this thing is.
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