Liam Neesons: THE MARKSMAN, HONEST THIEF, BLACKLIGHT, THE ICE ROAD, MEMORY, andORDINARY LOVE

The moment that indisputably made Liam Neeson an action star is the phone call in 2009’s Taken. That junky, xenophobic little action thriller, lifted entirely by the spectacle of a prestige actor slumming it, has that one great memorable moment in which the star commands total attention and gravitas. He’s playing a special agent whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers while on vacation in Paris. He gets one of the abductors on the phone and, in a low growl, says those infamous words:

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I         don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a         very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now         that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Remembered as an ultimate steely action movie threat of promised retribution—a short speech and statement of purpose—it, more than anything else, opened the doors for Neeson’s next fifteen years of action movies. He was immediately able to play dozens of tough old guys who still know how to muster up the ability to kick in some teeth and survive chases and shootouts. But watch the scene again and notice that it also taps into what the best of those pictures find: his sadness. You can see the fear and doubt on his face, the deliberate weighing of words that are as much about talking himself into action as they are scaring the bad guy. He takes one heavy pause, a slow blink, as he steels himself for what he hopes won’t have to come next. He’s tired, but determined. When he asks the villain to “let [his] daughter go now,” you really feel that he hopes that will be the end of it.

It’s because Neeson is so tall, broad-shouldered, and has a voice so paradoxically soft-spoken while in a gravely tenor, that he makes obvious sense as a heavy threat. He speaks softly and carries a big stick, moving with a slow but inexorable gait laden with potential violence. But it’s that sadness in his eyes, the ways his brow and chin draw down with a resting reluctance, that make him so sympathetic, too. In the best thrillers of this stretch of his career, like A Walk Among the Tombstones or The Grey or Non-Stop or Run All Night, he’s played alcoholics, disgraced cops or retiring robbers, suicidal workingmen, grieving fathers, and sullen widowers. (And that this string of melancholy action pictures began shortly after the sudden death of his wife adds an extra layer to the downbeat mood.) In each, the power comes, not merely from the action itself—though it can be quite well done—but from the mournful weight to the violence. You can feel it, because he’s so clearly affected by it. He enters the pictures sad, and the dutiful action unspools cautiously, reluctantly, forcefully. The spectacle adds weariness to his stance, and his slow-speed pursuit of justice. Or is it simply something to numb the pain and stave off the end?

This was exciting at first—an injection of soulfulness into what could be routine genre elements care of a star finding new corners of his persona. But the last couple years have seen Neeson’s action movies themselves feeling sadder and more tired. (Hey, aren’t we all?) In The Marksman, he’s a rancher on the southwestern border who protects an undocumented teenager who crosses the border onto his property, hunted by cartel guys and border agents. The reluctant protector is written as a flat Clint Eastwood type. In fact, he’s so creaky and terse one imagines that part was written for Eastwood. (Writer-director Robert Lorenz has worked with Clint as a producer, and his only prior directorial effort was the elderly Eastwood vehicle Trouble with the Curve. You do the math.) Neeson inhabits the role uneasily, but gets off some good semi-earnest sentimentality in the part, and is given some functional suspense sequences. But the movie’s entirely muddled on a political level, and the story isn’t good enough to call that ambiguity, or distract from its incoherent messaging. Neeson can’t save this one. But he’s on some better ground in writer-director Mark Williams’ Honest Thief, which at least has a clever conceit. In this one, he’s a prolific mysterious bank robber who’s fallen in love, and so decides to turn himself in, but the government agents to whom he confesses steal his enormous cash pile and set him up for a fall. That’s neat, and the movie’s eccentric ensemble of quirky bit parts goes a long way to keeping it from falling too flat, but the plot is executed with a sluggish trudge that takes a long time going where we always think it will.

Neeson then re-teamed with Williams for Blacklight, a movie that also has a healthy distrust of law enforcement. In this one, Neeson’s an FBI fixer who is drawn into a larger understanding of a conspiracy to murder a progressive politician. He then has to help stop them before they hurt more people. In the opening scene, an Ocasio-Cortez kinda-sorta lookalike is killed in a hit-and-run, and soon an investigative journalist and a whistleblower are imperiled by nefarious Deep State death squads led by a sneering agent (Aidan Quinn) who casually talks about quashing protestors. (This one squirmingly feels the tenor of the times in spots.) The whole thing’s at once too hyperbolic and too chintzy, full of nearly provocative ideas for which it loses nerve, cavernous nowheres where the plot’s detail and dimension should be, and the Neeson character is almost superfluous to the plot’s mechanics. The picture wants pseudo-70’s paranoid style, but is shot in an overlit textureless digital smear in Melbourne doubling unconvincingly for D.C. I wish its style and substance was as wild as its ambitions. But at least those movies are not as perilously thin as Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road, in which Neeson’s ice road trucker gets entangled in some shady shenanigans. There’s nothing real or convincing about anything, from character to location to action. And it even has Laurence Fishburne around loaning just part of his natural gravitas to the proceedings!When they can’t make a truck chase across a frozen river exciting, you know the movie’s gone wrong.

It’s starting to feel like the Neeson: Action Star project is just about out of steam. The feeling is all through his latest, Martin Campbell’s Memory. Though it has such a good idea for him to play, that makes it all the more disappointing it’s just another middling thriller built from off-the-shelf parts. (And from a director who successfully rebooted James Bond twice! Alas…) Here Neeson’s a veteran hitman succumbing to Alzheimers. What a frightening prospect! There’s a chilling moment in the middle of the picture where the guy’s refused to follow through on an assassination of a 13-year-old girl. That night, he has a nightmare in which he kills her. The next morning, her death is reported on the news. Wait, he thinks, did I? Or didn’t I? The movie plays on the terrible ambiguity, but only for a moment. Turns out he didn’t, so he spends the rest of the movie fighting his slipping mind as a supporting character to the larger investigation carried out by a detective played by a stringy-haired, slumped-shouldered Guy Pearce. The sheer tonnage of routine shoe-leather and rote shootings weigh down the potentially clever ideas at its center, and bury the actors—even Monica Bellucci as a dastardly real estate mogul—in a blandly developed conspiracy that’s too-easily unraveled for us in the audience. Once that’s sorted, then it’s just a glum matter of hoping the characters can figure it out in time.

As thrillers of this ilk have been diminishing returns for Neeson, his most satisfying movie of the past few years is a straight drama: Ordinary Love. The story it tells is ordinary, and it is tender plain-spoken simplicity that gives it power. Here’s a movie about an aging couple (Neeson paired with Lesley Manville). They’re comfortable with each other, so much that even their slight tensions and disagreements can be shrugged off. They go for walks. They grocery shop. They watch TV. They trade chores. There’s an unspoken absence. The mantle photos show a daughter they don’t mention for quite a while. You get the sense she’s dead before they ever make reference to her grave. Like any couple of this sort, they’ve accumulated quite the history, and it sits unspoken on their shoulders, weighing in on every exchange. This makes a fatal diagnosis a cruel puncture to their clearly hard-won comfort. The movie follows matter-of-factly the aftermath of this diagnosis as a course of treatment is decided upon and inevitable emotional and interpersonal struggles arrive from heavy potential outcomes hanging over their heads. The screenplay from playwright Owen McCafferty gives these actors space to explore the ideas inherent in this situation, with Manville providing such a heartrending quivering in her stiff upper lip, and Neeson’s facility with grief and sadness is refined in a film of pinprick specificity. Somehow he’s looped back around to this sort of picture being the refreshing change of pace. How satisfying to see a picture so small, so plain, and yet carrying a lifetime of feeling.

Not Easy Being Green: GREEN LANTERN

It’s the summer of Marvel superheroes at the multiplex. So far we’ve had Thor and the X-Men lighting up the screens and Captain America is well on his way. Interrupting Marvel’s monopolistic hold over our superhero-movie dollars is DC’s Green Lantern. They shouldn’t have bothered. It pales in comparison to its recent genre competition, but it also emerges as one of the leading contenders for worst-of-the-year. Not only that, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the most joyless, eccentrically idiotic superhero movies ever made.

It starts on a wobbly promising note with the soothing voice of Geoffrey Rush playing over a CGI lightshow. He tells us all about the history of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force that draws energy from willpower (which is manifested in the color green, in case you didn’t know). It’s all well and good, with green-suited creatures floating around, until a long-vanquished enemy, a nasty brown cloud of roiling evil, returns to feed on fear. He – she? it? – slurps up yellow tendrils of emotion from its victims leaving behind only a brown shell of a cadaver.

I was on board for this sci-fi silliness, no problem. I can handle a bit of cheese with my spectacle. But the instant this movie sets foot on Earth, the whole balance of the tone collapses. Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a hotshot ladies’ man test pilot who cavalierly wrecks a fighter jet and twinkles at his love interest (Blake Lively) until he finds a dying alien (Temuera Morrison) who gives him a ring that makes him the newest member of the Green Lantern Corps. Reynolds, who is occasionally quite good in other movies, has a kind of blandly likable presence that crumbles under the demands of this film. His sort-of-sweet, sort-of-smirking persona can’t handle placement within a superheroic context.

Of course, the film itself is of no help whatsoever to him. This is a curiously uncontrolled picture with tone careening all over the place. It’s at once a self-serious story loaded with fake-complex alien rules and regulations and a self-mocking mess with lines like “You think I won’t recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones?” And it’s all so glum and lifeless, devoid of tension as it blunders from one anti-climax to the next. Once Hal Jordan zooms off to twinkling, goofy Lantern-land, he quickly decides he doesn’t like his powers, or maybe he just doesn’t like being scolded by a pink-skinned alien (Mark Strong). He doesn’t seem to understand that the green ring gives him the power to conjure up whatever he decides to create with his mind. When he finally uses his powers, it’s so horribly dull. He conjures a giant Hot Wheels racetrack to boomerang a crashing helicopter away from a fancy party. He creates swords, giant guns, a catapult. He can create anything, but is predictably Earthbound in his thinking.

He sulks back to Earth and then decides, hey, he may as well use this power now that he has it. It’s such a weirdly uncommitted, half-hearted plot that seems to feature CG spectacle almost by accident while on Earth and then seems to approximate human emotions only by happenstance while roaming the cosmos. For a movie that zips across the entire galaxy there’s a curious lack of stakes. The aforementioned cloud of evil is threatening the entire galaxy – the Earth itself is about to be slurped up before too long – and yet there’s hardly a sense that anyone’s actually in any danger. Ryan Reynolds, especially, just floats around like a face placed on a computerized green body without any sense that he’s actually physically participating in the fantasy.

Also along for this interminable dud is a criminally misused supporting cast. Of Blake Lively, so devastatingly described by The Onion as being at the “top of the lists of names you hear,” the less said the better. Let me just say that to call her acting wooden would be an insult to the block of wood that could have put in a better performance. There are good actors floundering here, too, though. Geoffrey Rush puts in time as the voice of a fish-faced Green Lantern. Peter Sarsgaard shows up as a mad scientist who grows a bulging brain, much to the chagrin of his senator father played by Tim Robbins. They try to chew some scenery, but never get the chance to work up a nice chomping pace. Poor Angela Bassett fares even worse as a fellow scientist who is made to recite expositional lines with a uniformly flat affect. These four performers (three of them Oscar nominated) are such usually excellent thespians that they could probably turn up in an excellent movie together now that they’ve collected these hopefully sizable paychecks.

This is a sad, pitiful, goopy green movie that looks absolutely dismal. It’s uninspired, certainly, but it also has visuals that are dim, murky, and chintzy and I saw it in 2D. I can’t imagine how much worse it is in 3D. To make a bad experience worse, there’s so little of interest happening in this gaudy glop of a movie. It’s a terminally undercooked experience. So little seems to happen on a plot level, an emotional level, a filmmaking level. Director Martin Campbell, who in the past has been know to make a fine action movie (most recently Casino Royale, quite possibly the best James Bond movie ever made), handles the mushy stew of words that four credited writers slapped into a screenplay with uncharacteristic flatness. The whole film just sits on the screen for a while until it finally gasps into its end credits. It has the feel of a franchise nonstarter, which is just as well, since given what I just sat through, I never never never want to see Green Lantern 2.

Living on the EDGE OF DARKNESS

For a knee-jerk reactionary vigilante thriller, Edge of Darkness is surprisingly restrained with a long, slow burn of a mystery capped with swift brutal vengeance doled out in efficient action beats. It often follows a traditional structure for this type of movie, but it’s still shockingly satisfying even if we’ve more or less been here before.

At the film’s opening a corpse bubbles up to the surface of a lake with an ominous factory in the background. We return to this event later, but for the time being we are introduced to a grizzled Boston detective played by Mel Gibson. Whatever you think of his personal behavior (his drunken anti-Semitic rant is rightly a permanent smudge on his reputation) he has a compelling screen presence. He’s not a great actor, necessarily, but he has a force that draws attention and sympathy. In the opening moments of the film, his character is meeting his twenty-something daughter (Bojana Novakovic) who is returning home during time off from the nuclear facility at which she works. Just when we get our bearings she’s gunned down on the front porch, just minutes into the film. The act of violence is shocking in its force and gore, the shot flinging her back through the door with blood splattering the doorframe and staining the rug. But, as we are told, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, especially in the kind of movie in which the bereaved father has access to all the tools of a professional detective.

Probing the mystery of his daughter’s murder, Gibson visits her place of work, which brings us to the ominous factory of the opening shot. There he meets her boss, a slimy executive played by the great Danny Huston. Although he’s clearly the villain from the minute he walks on screen, Huston plays it so well, so coolly, that the point isn’t “how’d or why’d he do it?”, but “when will he be taken down?” Along the way, there are plenty of other slimeballs propped up as fodder for the vengeance machine, including an infuriating senator (Damian Young) and a shadowy suit (Denis O’Hare). There’s also a wild card whose allegiances may or may not be slippery; he’s played by the always welcome Ray Winstone who brings a performance filled with perfect shades of gray.

Gibson’s search for the truth is entertainingly handled, with this slick, professional production smoothly turning the gears of the plot. By the time the big reveals occur, the sensation of bloody justice feels earned. It is always a little queasy to have a movie so thoroughly work up the blood lust, coaxing dark feelings of violence out of the audience, but this movie, despite its sometimes squishy gunshots, doesn’t linger on injury in unseemly ways, nor does it go out of its way to glamorize the violence. This is a tight thriller with sharp blasts of satisfying revenge. Director Martin Campbell, adapting a 1980's miniseries that he directed, does a capable job of managing tone and expectations. The movie held my interest all the way through. I cared about Gibson’s quest for revenge and, yes, I felt a rush of adrenaline every time he moved closer to his ultimate goal. This is a smoothly enjoyable piece of popcorn filmmaking, a dependable, if ultimately slight, piece of entertainment.