The forgetful assassin
Fan favourite Liam Neeson is headlining another action movie clunker
You could make an interesting Venn diagram out of the movies in which Liam Neeson has starred in the last few years. He's done remakes of foreign films — see Cold Pursuit and the coming-soon Retribution. He's played killers in Blacklight and the in-production In the Land of Saints and Sinners. And he's been a tough guy trying to do the right thing in The Marksman and The Ice Road.
And then there's Memory, which seems to have been reverse-engineered to be the perfect late-career Liam Neeson action thriller. It's got foreign pedigree, being a remake of the 2003 Belgian movie The Memory of a Killer, also known as The Alzheimer's Case. Neeson plays an assassin — in fact, he offs his first victim not three minutes into the film. But he's got a moral code; he won't kill kids, damn it!
He's also suffering from progressive memory loss, something screenwriter Dario Scardapane illustrates hamhazardly, which is my term for something both haphazard and ham-handed. In an early scene we see Neeson's character, Alex Lewis, forgetting where he left his car keys. A little while later he's using his arm as a notepad to remember details about his assignments. But other than playing into the very end of the story, the condition has little effect on the plot.
That gets rolling when Alex refuses to kill Beatriz (Mia Sanchez), a young victim of sex trafficking whom someone believes knows too much. Another killer then steps in to finish the job, and tries to take Alex out for good measure, which leads to bodies piling up all over El Paso. Two steps behind Alex for most of the film are FBI agents Serra and Amistead (Guy Pearce, Taj Atwal), along with Ray Fearon as their hard-as-nails boss, and Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora of the local police.
In true crime thriller fashion, Serra senses that Alex, despite a life of crime, is a man to be trusted, since he wants to bring down the highlevel scumbags who hire him to do their dirty work. Neeson hasn't had a great run of late. The last truly memorable movie he was in was Steve McQueen's Widows from 2018, and he was just part of an ensemble.
Turning 70 this year, he seems to be going for quantity over quality. Memory, alas, goes in the first category. It's forgettable.