Jonah Naplan   September 22, 2023

It may not seem entirely obvious, but yes, “Retribution” is yet another “Liam Neeson has skills” action movie, though this time around, the veteran actor, playing a blandly gruff father named Matt Turner, is not given the advantages of running, shooting, punching and kicking. For 98% of the film’s runtime, Neeson is seatbelt bound to a speeding car on the streets of metropolitan Berlin, accomplishing tasks thrown at him by a vicious figure on the other side of a cell phone. A bomb has been planted under his leather seat, and if he tries to unbuckle and leave, well, as they say … KABLOOEY.

Along for the deadly ride are Turner’s two kids, Zach (Jack Champion) and Emily (Lilly Aspell), who of course get roped into this vicious plot on the one day that Matt reluctantly agrees to drive them to school. His obtuse, workaholic nature has made him estranged from his wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz), and the only thing he cares about nowadays is pleasing his boss Anders Muller (Matthew Modine). Neeson does not play the most likable character in the whole world, but we can’t see why someone would go through all this trouble to plant a bomb in his car as a form of vengeance—or retribution, for that matter—for some misbegotten action he did many years ago that he can’t even seem to remember.

“Retribution” echoes themes of the “Jason Bourne” franchise, the “Saw” movies, and even “Taken,” but though the premise has some inherent potential for genuine thrills, director Nimród Antal’s film falls flat on its face early on, and never really manages to pick itself back up. There’s probably about a solid 20 minutes of fun trapped inside the 90-minute runtime of “Retribution,” a movie that is somehow both far too long and far too short to be effective.

It’s not just that the filmmakers and Neeson himself (who’s made enough of these throwaway action movies by now to satisfy his own dedicated streaming service) never really find a purpose or meaning for their jumbled narrative, it’s that the movie fails so spectacularly at thrilling us or even diverting our attention for a good five minutes that it dissipates from memory seconds after the credits roll. There’s but one or two good ideas in “Retribution”; the first is that the bomb is powered by a cell phone that Turner surmises can be deactivated if only the police (led by Noma Dumezweni) listen to his pleas to disable the city’s cell service; the second is how Turner (inevitably) ends up escaping from the doomed vehicle, but even then, it’s preceded by an embarrassingly predictable twist that even the most tone deaf viewers can foresee a mile away, and followed by perhaps the cringiest string of final shots I’ve seen all year.

Neeson has always been such a great facial performer, an underrated tool in his repertoire, and “Retribution” is a film that knows it. The movie centers many of its shots on Neeson’s pained, watery blue eyes and clenched jaw, as he surveys a situation and lays out its possible outcomes. Unfortunately, this strong trait is not attributed to a character that earns it. Neeson is fine, but the movie struggles to adapt around him, rather than making him adapt around the movie. Even less developed are his two children, who are both generically written to be as annoying and insufferable as possible. They insult, they fight, they argue—in other words, all of the usual suspects—which are of course followed by a stern “knock it off!” or “that’s enough!” from Neeson’s character, who’s probably a good twenty years too old to be a father of children that age.

The dogged screenplay for “Retribution” was written by Chris Salmanpour, from whence it was adapted from the Spanish film “El desconocido” by Dani de la Torre, which itself has two other cinematic permutations. You can feel the strain to translate—and likely simplify—this story for American audiences, and to shuffle it off to the big screen, even though Lionsgate could have spared themselves a great deal of trouble (and money) by just releasing it on VOD (which is how I watched it), as where so many Bruce Willis vehicles of the last half-decade have found their respective homes.

But Liam Neeson doesn’t seem to give two craps about what an audience thinks, because he churns out roughly two or three of these every single year without fail—he already released a reboot of “Marlowe” this past February—and even a global pandemic didn’t stop him from roiling out “Honest Thief” and “The Marksman.” These movies don’t seem to be getting any better, and their frequency keeps multiplying. Amidst Netflix and Hulu on my Amazon Fire-Stick, I wouldn’t be surprised to find “Neeson+” pop up soon enough.