Liam Neeson has carved out a niche for himself in the Hollywood landscape. I saw him years ago in Darkman where he played an inadvertent avenging angel who accidently got doused with chemicals in an experiment. His turn as Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s put him on the map as an actor to watch out for after that. In the last twenty years or so he has been in quite a few action films and had settled into that role in his career. Retribution is another one of those types of roles for him.

Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is a happily married man with two children. He runs an investment firm and deals with high-leverage clients who put a lot of their money in his hands. In a change of schedule, he ends up having to take his kids to school on the way to work one day. That’s usually his wife’s job. While driving he gets a strange phone call informing him that he has a bomb under his seat and he has to follow all the instructions from the caller or he and his children will die from the explosion. What follows is an adrenaline rush of a film from that point forward.

This film is a mix of a couple of other movies I can remember that do similar things as this. The first is the most obvious one and that’s Speed starring Keanu Reeves. Where passengers were on a bus that couldn’t go below 60 miles per hour or the bus would blow up. The second film that comes to mind is Locke starring Tom Hardy where he is in his car the entire time working out various issues and using phones and so forth to talk with different people he knows from CO workers to family members. This is the combination of what Retribution is.

Neeson has done it all regarding action films in his career but this one is a bit different for him. He had to rely on his acting ability more than just his skills as an action star. He had a lot of difficult dialogue with his business partners and still had to interact with various law enforcement officers and also be a dad to his two children. It wasn’t an easy role to play but Neeson makes it look easy. This could have been a throwaway role for him but he invested his time in building the characters’ world out with the help of the script by Chris Salmanpour and Ward Parry.

The direction by Nimrod Antel is a bit difficult to achieve in a film such as this because of all the driving around through the city streets. He had to get a lot of emotion from his actors while also trying to get the driving scenes down. Cameras on the car are nothing new but the combination of both was pretty good. The editing during these was seamless in these sequences. The director had a lot to balance and he did a good job with everything.

These types of films have issues with the villains and how they fit into the story. The villain in this story was a bit mysterious and when he was revealed it was a bit of an obvious person. I think anybody watching the film for a while could figure out who the villain was and his reasons for doing what he did. Of course, he had to have a monologue explaining himself to the main character so the audience could be in on the reasoning. I saw it coming a mile away but it was always going to be hard to get a believable villain in this story.

Retribution isn’t going to blow anyone’s mind. It’s not doing anything new that fans haven’t seen before and Neeson has done plenty of films in this vein.  If viewers are looking for a movie where you sit back and watch what’s going on and not think too hard about the motivations of the villain or the main character then this movie might fit the bill as the movie to take a date to isn’t trying to be any kind of high art. It’s just a simple action film with one of the best in recent memory who has made a career out of this kind of role. 

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen