Thirty years ago, Liam Neeson had rose from being a character actor in movies like The Delta Force and Excalibur to his Oscar-nominated performance as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List. Then, in 2008, he took a chance on a silly action thriller, Taken, where he turns into a vengeful father tracking down his daughter who’s been kidnapped by human traffickers.
Taken was a hit despite mixed reviews. But it set forth a long trail of movies in which Neeson was now an action hero and given rise to the “angry white guy/angry dad” genre that has sprung up during the 2010s and 2020s. By his own admission, he took the roles to help him grieve the lose of his wife, Natasha Richardson in 2009. And while we never really stop grieving someone’s loss, how much can you still basically make the same movie over and over? With the exception of the poorly marketed The Grey, a lot of the rest of these types of movies have been paint by numbers. I admit A Walk Among the Tombstones and Cold Pursuit had a great mixture to them, mostly because they were based on an original source material.
But movies like The Ice Road and The Commuter don’t offer much excitement or originality. He appeared in a supporting role in Silence, Martine Scorsese’s very dark and violent historical drama about how Christians were treated in Japan during the 1600s. And his appearance as the villain in the funny but uneven A Million Ways to Die in the Old West proved he can do comedy as well as his role in The LEGO Movie. He reportedly has been tapped by Million Ways‘ Seth MacFarlane to appear in a reboot of The Naked Gun. So, we’ll see how that goes?
It can’t possibly be worse than Retribution, his worse movie in the last few years since The Ice Road at least. I understand, a man’s got to eat and there probably was a nice paycheck, but c’mon, this is getting old now. But considering that Neeson spends the majority of the movie sitting on his bum, why wouldn’t he just want to do something like this? This is a remake of the 2015 Spanish movie El desconocido which translates into The Stranger. But both movies really seem to be based on Speed.
Neeson plays a financier, Matt Turner, living in Berlin, who’s too involved in his work to take any interest in his family. But his distanced wife, Heather (Embeth Davidtz), needs him to take their kids, Emily (Lily Asbell) and Zach (Jack Champion) to school one morning. He does after they have a little spat and from the second he sits in the driver’s seat, the bomb underneath is triggered. He gets a call from a cell phone in a glove compartment with a distorted voice that tells him there is a bomb underneath the seat and if he doesn’t do what they want, it will explode. And if he gets out of the car, the bomb will explode. You get the idea.
This could be interesting but it isn’t. The reason is that Speed had a great structure and the title had a double meaning. The bus needed to maintain its speed. But Keanu Reeves’ character was running against the clock so he had to have some speed in his actions and decisions. There’s not much thrills from a guy basically sitting in a luxury SUV talking to people on phones. I will admit the movie does set up a little suspense on who might be behind the bombings – Heather or a business partner Andres Muller (Matthew Modine)? But there’s really no reason to care.
Once the movie goes along with a crucial incident in the second act, you pretty much know who it is. And that’s the problem. There’s no real suspense. And most of the story line has to do with Matt’s job and a scandal that is developing that’s never really exposed the way it should to make everything work. Neeson has been doing these “angry dad” style of action movies so long, he’s slowly becoming the next Charlie Bronson. And that’s not a good thing. That might be why he wants to reinvent himself in his 70s as a comedian. Maybe he hopes it will work for him the way it did Leslie Nielsen.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 