After the unexpected and overwhelming success of “Taken” back in 2008, Liam Neeson is now best recognized mainly for the side role of an action hero in films that portray him as a reluctant antihero seeking vengeance for putting a simple guy with a set of unstoppable skills in great danger when family members are in trouble, which is ironic given his age. Currently 72, he has given interviews hinting that he might retire from the action genre, trying to become a modern-day Charles Bronson, and also trying to delve deeper into his acting (though I doubt that will happen anytime soon given that he recently appeared in a multitude of movies) but after watching him in Absolution, his last thriller movie, I don’t think many people will care. The movie itself wasn’t horrific, it was just quite bad and didn’t leave any lasting impression on the viewer because it forced them to watch an average sequel for a very long time.
Throughout the credits of the movie Neeson acted, he is referred to as Thug who used to be a boxer but is now an enforcer for a local gangster by the name of Charlie Conner (Ron Perlman), along with his pretend tough guy son Kyle (Daniel Diemer). Apart from this, in the daytime, he seems to be living a normal life in a working class part of Boston on his own. That said, all of that seems to be slowly amending after one night he went to a bar and met a woman named Yolanda Ross after punching her boyfriend. This took quite a toll on his mental health, so he went to the therapist only to find out that he had an advanced case of CTE and only has two years to live.
He decides to take advantage of the time he has left by resolving his regrets in life after making a flimsy attempt at taking it. (You saw the title.) In the first instance, he longs to reach out to the two grown children he nearly deserted. As he visits with his child, the daughter being Daisy (Frankie Shaw), she rudely tells him, first that she does not want to associate with him, second, she cuts him out saying that the visions that he had with his son are not ever going to be realized and lastly, she unceremoniously tells him that she is on the verge of losing the house, one that she jointly owns with her two kids. At the same time, while making a drop off for his boss, he notices a teenage sex ring operating and he seeks to find a means of rescuing one of the perpetrators (Deanna Tarraza). As if that wasn’t enough, during a subsequent job of his, there is a botched assassination attempt on him as well which hints that there are people who really want him dead. Almost, every one of the plot points that I have cited gets resolved one way or another across the course of the highly action-packed night that encompasses the last portion of the film.
If it’s all beginning to sound slightly familiar, there is a good reason for it: Tony Gatyon’s screenplay is essentially a fusion of all of Liam Neeson’s action films including the one where he played an actor who suffers from a severe amnestic syndrome in ‘Memory’ (2022), which in itself was an odyssey through a world swamped with rage and violence. He does, however, feel a little out of place as an actor in the film. Indeed, the aesthetics of the film are rather conventional as even the direction is rather dull. For example, we’ve already seen the plot where the hero and one of the women solving unusual crimes have increasing trust issues, thus leading us through the story. But yes – there are instances, during the first half of the film, when the camera settles down for some close-in shots to get a better understanding or for reasons far deeper than the eye. This includes his relationship with the Woman, his son and grandson (Terrence Pulliam) with whom he has lost contact and visions of his long-gone father whose neglect he inherited. Nevertheless, these scenes are between Thug and his grandson, and while they are pretty adorably entertaining, they aren’t terribly inventive, so those who only entered the theatre for the sake of the action-packed trailers will certainly start losing interest.
Some of the other touches, on the other hand, such as the conceit of not giving two of the key characters proper names or the dream sequences involving his father, do not work at all and only end up hinting at lofty artistic ambitions that the film never quite figures out how to embrace.
“Absolution” was helmed by Hans Petter Moland, with whom Neeson worked on one of the very best of his action programmers the clever and amusing “Cold Pursuit” (2019) – but this one comes nowhere near close to that one. The sentimentality on display here is no match to the darker humor of the earlier team-up which is the better of the two. However, this can easily be placed in the ‘being made with a certain degree of skill’ column as it surely does not have the late period cannon films fodder feel of such duds as ‘The Marksman’ (2021), ‘Blacklight’ (2022), ‘Retribution’ (2023) and other similar films which you probably are trying to forget still do exist, but yes, being a film that is relatively slim in its narrative, the nearly two hour run time does tend to stretch out a lil bit.
Physically Neeson appears to be someone who can really kick ass, and even the more contrived moments are quite enjoyable thanks to his immense presence, however watching him go through his paces here is akin to witnessing the grand pianist play chopsticks for a whopping 112 minutes, there was certainly some unparalleled effort put in but everyone, including him, is aware that there is such potential being underutilized.
Maybe if Neeson had only occasionally sampled the action genre in the last decade, Absolution would have seemed like a sweet but bungled effort of combining the usual action elements with a thoughtful human narrative. As it stands, the movie is a lengthy and slightly less than deep work that wants for a bit more than to be another of the Neeson action fest, failing in the attempt, and becoming yet another one. To those who managed to watch most of those, I can say this is perhaps one of the better examples of the most interesting sub-genre. But this is really more a matter of this work than the earlier ones of Neeson, rather the sheer pathetic quality of many of N’s shoot-em-ups over the years.
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