The decision to watch this movie was something of a desperation measure. At time of writing, I’m not only still dealing with the finale of the After series with After Everything, which even for that series is pretty damn bad, but also having watched the new Digimon movie the night before and… well, recovering from the realisation that a kids’ movie could turn out that badly. As such, even though Liam Neeson’s film career has been in a bit of a worrying place in recent years, I went into this knowing that it wasn’t going to some grand masterwork, but still hoping that it would least be better than the other shit I’ve seen over the past 24 hours. And thankfully, I can report that this film is actually not that bad.
The premise is pretty straight-forward: Neeson is a banker, driving his kids to school, who gets called to inform him that there is a bomb under his seat, which will go off unless he does exactly what the caller tells him to. It’s a bit of Speed mixed with some Phone Booth, emphasising the confined space for the victim of some puppet-master thrills, with Neeson as yet another man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Starting out with Neeson in front of a punching bag in his office (already showing more physicality on his part than in the entirety of Blacklight), the man works well within this framework. He spends most of the film trying to be brave while internally inching towards completely snapping, becoming the public face of what appears to be an ongoing string of terrorist bombings in Berlin as he carries out the voice’s commands. Both as an extension of his stock “you don’t want to see what I’d do to save my family” stock persona and as the dramatic centre for the thrills of the plot, this is a better showcase of his talents than I’m used to seeing nowadays.
The presentation does a lot to heighten the tension as well. Director Nimrรณd Antal (who made the criminally underrated Predators) and DP Flavio Labiano rely mainly on interior shots from inside the car, focusing on Neeson’s Matt Turner and Jack Champion and Lilly Aspell as his kids. While I would have preferred if this were more like a chamber play on wheels and have all the shots taken from inside the car, the framing and camera angles still bring out how isolated and fearful the characters are. Their performances are solid too; Champion continues his upward trajectory off of Avatar: The Way Of Water and Scream VI as the disaffected son, while Aspell gets some genuinely cute and even cool moments. Her little smile after hearing her dad call the voice an asshole was nice.
The narrative as a whole has had a lot of road-testing, seeing as this is not only a remake of a 2015 Spanish film, but there have been two other remakes before this in the German-language Don’t. Get. Out! and the Korean-language Hard Hit. Even beyond that, the film’s innards are still quite familiar, like with the aforementioned ‘keep driving and no one gets hurt’ impetus of Speed along with some similar anti-capitalist sentiment as that found in The Commuter. But the influences are used well, with the gradual unfurling of the whys and hows of the villain’s plot making for some decent commentary, as if the “on behalf of the American middle class” line from Commuter was extrapolated into an entire film. Not a bad look, honestly.
This isn’t something that’s going to blow anyone’s socks off, between the familiarity of the plot and the general apathy towards Neesonsploitation, but for the meat-and-potatoes thriller it is, it’s still pretty good. The tension holds steady throughout, the performances sell the stakes of the plot, and the smaller thematic touches about corporate greed and who truly gets hurt when banks lose (hint: it’s not the banks themselves) ring true. If you’re looking for a quick-and-dirty B-movie thriller, it’s a decent option, and gives some hope that Neeson can still deliver as a leading man.
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