Average Dude says: Absolutely nothing impressive in Retribution

Retribution is the latest offering from Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions. At the wheel is Liam Neeson, a veteran everyman action star. Why do we love him so much? I think it’s because he could be us. He doesn’t have tatooed muscles popping out of his second-skin v-neck shirt. He can’t (I presume) do the splits between two chairs. No leaping, twirling wirework in his movies. No martial arts training. He’s just a dude with ‘a very particular set of skills’. I have a very particular set of skills but they probably wouldn’t help me in a close-quarters battle with tree-trunk biceps, insane flexibility or the average Asian assasin.

Liam, Liam, Liam…what have they Taken from us?

Yet, for whatever reason, most of us like Liam Neeson. Taken let us believe that, if our daughter somehow ran afoul of the absolute worst, darkest, fast-pass to hell souls on earth, we could take any hit, any pain and still rain merciless wrath down ‘pon them and sleep like a baby afterwards. In fact, the Aslan’s share of Neeson movies do similar service. Average Dudes doing above average shite for the most bestest of reasons. It’s pretty much a given that this is an inherent element of his movies.

But O. M. G…just make it good

The premise of Retribution is that Neeson plays a workaholic businessman from company X that is particularly skilled at convincing investors to give him insane amounts of money. What does company X do? No idea. But when shite starts going south, his job is then to convince them to stay the course and not cut bait and curse their losses. No new cinematic ground, that’s for sure.

Also, there appears to be a series of car bombings going on around the region that foreshadow the protagonist’s dilema. But aside from one, none seem to be connected to said dilema. Huh? What the frick? But away we go anyway.

Don’t make me turn this bomb around!

Neeson, the emotionally distant father and husband, has to take his two tweenage kids to school. We the audience are inflicted by their cliche’d and unremarkable acting as the bickering siblings and disrespectful angsty adolescents. Boredom begins to set in.

Then, the real ‘action’ (uh huh) picks up as a hidden phone rings and is answered. The villain is now established by way of voice modulated threat of incineration and the ominous promise ‘I’m always watching’. Okay, sure.

Now that you have the setup…

What follows is about an hour of cat and mouse between villain and victim, but only if the cat was advanced in years and about 30 lbs overweight, and the mouse was the emotional equivalent of your computer mouse. Every performance in Retribution was as bland and forgetable as the average male high school substitute teacher. Which actually seems hard to do, given the stakes of the whole movie. I feel like I might have been a tad bit more invested in current events if I were sitting on fiery death that could be set off because of a bad burrito dinner.

As in almost any suspense movie of this nature, part of the fun is trying to figure out who the villain is before the end of the movie. I won’t tell you who that is, but given that there were less than a handful of characters to choose from (if you include the children) I don’t think you will have a problem with it. In fact, all doubt is pretty much erased long before the final reveal. Ugh.

what’s in a name?

I’m even having trouble reconciling the title of the movie with exactly what element of it pertained to actual Retribution of any kind? It’s like the producers asked ChatGPT to kick out a list of menacing words to title an action movie and this one was near the top.

I’m going to give Retribution a 1.75 out of 5. The one thing I liked about this movie was that it was short, clocking in at 1 h 30 m. And thanks to lackluster acting, it still seemed long and bloated. Having been in such gems as Chronicles of Narnia, The Grey, Rob Roy et al, it’s sad to see Liam Neeson resort to shlock this bad. You were Zeus, for cryin’ out loud! C’mon, man! I know you have a particular set of skills. I just really hate that you are not that particular about what movies you use them in.

Maybe I can sneak into Blue Beetle for a half hour or so.

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