Retribution premieres in theaters August 25.
Planes, trains, and automobiles: Is there no form of transportation Liam Neeson can’t commandeer for one of his signature exercises in AARP ass-kicking? Even a snow plow isn’t safe from his particular set of skills. In Retribution, a thin, contrived, mercifully economical dose of post-Taken suspense, Neeson’s jurisdiction shrinks to the driver’s seat of a Mercedes. At this rate, the star will soon be barking threats and solving a mystery from a golf cart.
Neeson’s character in Retribution is Matt Turner, a Berlin-based hedge-fund guy stuck in a very sticky situation. Under his seat is a bomb primed to explode if he goes under 50 mph tries to get out of the car. In the backseat are his children, a moody teenager (Jack Champion, fresh from James Cameron’s Pandora but noticeably older) and a button-cute grade-schooler (Lilly Aspell). And on the phone is the culprit, disguising both his voice and his motives. Matt is the kind of workaholic who pays more attention to his clients than his family. Thankfully for his kids, he’s still a Liam Neeson character; we know he’s no business-bro wimp because the first thing we see him do is slug a boxing bag.
Like Memory and Cold Pursuit before it, Retribution reconfigures a European B-movie – in this case, the 2015 Spanish thriller of the same name – with the slightly haunted urgency that links just about every entry in Neeson’s ongoing multiplex hustle as an action hero of a certain age. Behind the wheel is director Nimród Antal, the no-frills genre journeyman who made such energetic pulp-junk as Vacancy, Armored, and the underrated Predators. He adapts well to the spatial limitations of the real-time, single-vehicle scenario, which mostly amounts to Neeson stealing concerned glances into the rearview mirror and – his signature move – whispering tense words into a receiver. If Arnold had his one-liners, Neeson has his way with a phone line.
The basic premise recalls Speed, minus both the nonstop excitement and the logistical consistency. Whereas that ’90s popcorn classic used the game plan of a mad bomber as a route to escalating complications, Retribution casually, conveniently breaks its villain’s rules throughout. Are the kids wired in, too? Can Matt tell the police what’s going on or not? What kind of self-respecting bad guy lets the hero ignore his phone calls for minutes on end? The suspense peaks early, when Neeson’s family man has to pry his kids’ smart phones away – talk about a herculean battle against the odds! – without frightening them with the truth of the hostage situation they’ve been pulled into.
Matt, we’re led to assume, is buckled into a reckoning, paying for the mistakes of his past. But who’s meting out the judgment on the other end of the line? The answer isn’t especially satisfying – or, if you’re paying attention to matters of casting and blocking, surprising. Retribution isn’t a daring enough thriller to truly make its hero a victim of his own choices. Matt’s biggest sin is that he’s… an inconsistent father. Think he’ll make up for that by the crawl of the credits? Even the title, a generic misnomer, is misleading.
Neeson’s burnished dignity holds things together, if only barely. For as often as he finds himself acting with a rectangular box at his ear, he never really phones in these late-career paycheck gigs. His tightening features in close-up, captured through a windshield or in a mirror, are enough to painlessly pass Retribution’s fleet 90 minutes. But any real danger, any sense that the bomb might actually explode or Matt might lose his grip on the situation, is sorely missed. The thrills are set to cruise control, even if Neeson never is.