Retribution

Driven to Nowhere: The Exhaustion of the Neeson Thriller

A specific kind of exhaustion sets in when you realize a movie is perfectly happy being exactly what you feared. Liam Neeson has spent fifteen years in a self-perpetuating loop, churning out mid-budget, European-backed thrillers where he growls into phones and protects his estranged family. I don't really blame the guy; it's a steady paycheck. But with Nimród Antal’s *Retribution*, we’ve finally reached the absurd endpoint of this late-career stretch: a Liam Neeson action flick where the 71-year-old lead barely has to get out of his seat.

He plays Matt Turner, a US financier living in a gray, overcast Berlin, who herds his annoyed kids (Jack Champion and Lilly Aspell) into the family SUV for school. Suddenly, a phone rings in the console. A voice tells Matt there are pressure-sensitive bombs under the seats. One person steps out, the car blows; if Matt fails to follow the financial instructions, the car blows. It’s essentially *Speed* in a suit. Antal proved he could wring tension out of tight spots in 2007 with *Vacancy*, but he seems totally uninspired by the claustrophobia here. Rather than using the cramped space, the camera just drifts around the dashboard, waiting for the plot to find a direction.



The real tragedy isn't the bomb plot; it's what got lost in the adaptation. *Retribution* is actually the third remake of the 2015 Spanish film *El Desconocido*. In that version, the banker was targeted by someone whose life was ruined by the man's predatory financial advice—it actually had a point. Screenwriter Chris Salmanpour strips away that class critique, replacing it with a brainless twist about embezzlement and offshore accounts. At one point, Matt has to watch a colleague's car explode in the street just to prove the bomber is serious. The fireball is big, but the emotional weight is non-existent. Matt just grips the wheel a bit harder and keeps driving in literal and narrative circles.



Neeson’s physical presence usually carries these movies. He’s built like a redwood and has a weary gravity that makes you believe he can take a beating. But stuffing that towering frame into a driver’s seat for ninety minutes completely neutralizes his best asset. You can see the stiffness in his posture. He doesn't get to use his 'particular set of skills'—he just shouts at Berlin traffic and argues with a villain who sounds increasingly bored. Noma Dumezweni shows up briefly as an Interpol agent trying to make sense of the chaos, bringing a welcome touch of tired professionalism, but the movie gives her absolutely nothing to do.



I kept hoping the movie would finally acknowledge its own absurdity and have some fun, but it never happens. The whole thing moves with a joyless, funeral-march seriousness that feels totally unearned. As the critic at RogerEbert.com put it, the script feels like "it was derived from a version of Mad Libs for writers hoping to develop the most formulaic scripts imaginable". Whether that’s a dealbreaker depends on your tolerance for background noise. *Retribution* isn't offensive, just deeply exhausted. It’s the cinematic version of a car idling in a driveway, burning through the last fumes of a once-reliable engine.