Maybe It’s Time for Liam Neeson to Retire From the Action-Movie Game
Liam Neeson has played Jesuit priests, Jedi masters, Greek gods, German industrialists, revolutionary heroes (Irish and Scottish), iconic sexologists, and megalomaniacal supervillains. Make him play one man with a particular set of skills — skills that make him a nightmare for folks who want to harm his loved ones — and the next thing you know, Neeson has to save his family/friends/fellow plane and train passengers every other time he walks out the door. The 71-year-old actor has range for days, but after Taken reestablished him as someone you do not want to fuck with, he’s settled into the groove of what now feels less like a career reset and more like a rut. He’ll still do the occasional prestige project. But it’s beginning to feel like being an actor is a moonlighting gig he does when he’s not being an AARP-demographic action hero.
Retribution is the kind of high-concept thriller that, on paper, must have sounded like a cross between a straight-down-the-middle gig and an easy payday. It’s a remake of a 2016 Spanish movie, El Desconocido, that dominated the country’s version of the Oscars the year it was released. Neeson’s character, Matt Turner, isn’t a retired cop, or a hit man who’s left his old life behind, or a former Special Ops guy set to enjoy his autumn years in peace. He’s just a banker based in Berlin with some bigwig accounts. Crucially, however, Matt is also a father — a Neeson specialty! — albeit one that apparently favors his job over his family. His wife Heather (his Schindler’s List co-star Embeth Davidtz) has had enough of her husband’s workaholism wreaking havoc on their family. And besides, she asked him to drive their teenage kids, Zach (Jack Champion) and Emily (Lilly Aspell), to school today because she has something she has to do, and Matt’s not only forgotten this request but is busy trying to talk a skittish client into staying with the bank. Why can’t he just be present and paternal and a halfway decent life partner for one second!
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So he brusquely growls at the kids to get into the car in between under-his-breath mutterings, angry that he has to play referee to a lot of backseat bickering on such a crucial morning. He averts the crisis at work. Then a phone rings. No one recognizes the ringtone. Eventually, Matt digs out a strange cell next to his seat. He takes the call. A digitally downtuned voice on the other end tells him there’s a bomb in the car. The device is hardwired to go off if he exits the vehicle. Do as he’s told, the caller says, and he and his family may make it out alive.
It’s Speed for overworked and beleagured dads, in other words. And given the tailored-to-Neeson’s sweet-spot role and the track record of Hungarian filmmaker Nimród Antal — easily one of the most underrated pulp directors working today; watch Vacancy (2007), Armored (2009) or Predators (2010), and you’ll realize he missed his calling as a Hollywood B-movie auteur by a half century — Retribution should work beautifully. Spoiler: It does not. Turner is eventually framed for a series of similar car bombs that kill several coworkers, and is blackmailed into nearly shooting his boss (Matthew Modine). The cops and a Europol agent (Noma Dumezweni, a.k.a. the Queen in the recent live-action Little Mermaid) try to apprehend him. He tries to convince them he’s innocent. Eventually, Turner discovers his inner nurturing patriarch and switches gears into revenge-seeking protector of the brood when the plot demands it. The mystery villain is revealed, though the real enemies here are apparently narrative logic and your suspension of disbelief, given how badly the movie abuses both. Nothing makes a lick of sense.
Much of this would be forgivable if, like us, you have the capacity to enjoy Liam Neeson doing his patented Angry Dad Off the Leash even at the expense of things like compelling storytelling or the occasional deviation from extreme predictability. Few stars have leaned into a late-career pivot with such gusto, and it’s not like the movies are minting leading men over the age of 40 with gravitas, chops, and the sense that they could break you if you crossed them any more. But the returns, they have been seriously diminishing with these Neeson genre exercises, and even the big man seems terminally bored by this stuff at this point.
Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring. There are so many more kings and cads, great men and flawed leaders left for Neeson to play. He should look for these parts. He will find them. And he will nail them, hopefully before one particular set of skills drives his career off a cliff.
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