Liam Neeson plays a man sitting on a bomb that has been planted in his car by a mysterious tormentor in the umpteenth thriller starring the AARP-eligible actor.
In his newest film, “Retribution” — a remake of a 2015 Spanish film of the same name — Neeson plays Matt Turner, an American investment banker in Berlin. While chauffeuring his teenage son and daughter to school one day, Matt learns he is sitting on a bomb that will detonate if he stops the car, tries to get out or otherwise fails to obey the instructions of a mysterious stranger at the other end of his cellphone.
So far, so familiar, at least in the broadest contours of a story about a man under … let’s just call it duress. Unlike many of Neeson’s characters, Matt doesn’t possess “a very particular set of skills” here, as the actor’s character in “Taken,” Bryan Mills, so euphemistically described his own lethality. Matt has a driver’s license and his wits. And maybe that’s enough.
This is the third collaboration between Neeson and producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman . Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed Neeson in those two films , here moves into the producer’s chair. Although there’s a certain cozy comfort to watching Neeson and his regular collaborators do their thing for the umpteenth time, a thing the actor has now been doing for 15 years, the whole operation feels more like a well-oiled machine — a cold commodity — than a warm blanket, or even a living thing.
As Heineman put it in the film’s press material, “Over our time with Liam, we’ve got to crash a plane and derail a train. In ‘Retribution,’ we are blowing cars up all over Berlin.”There is a twist ending, and it’s not a bad one, assuming you haven’t seen the original Spanish film. And there’s a certain satisfaction in watching almost all the action transpire from the front seat of a claustrophobic car.
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