Memory review: Liam Neeson’s Taken era is reaching its messy end

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how long a shadow TakenCast. It’s been 14 years since director Pierre Morel redefined Liam Neeson’s place in cinema with his 2008 film, which cast the dramatic actor against type as an ex-CIA operative and combat powerhouse. Many action films featuring Neeson since then have followed the footsteps of a well-worn dance. The kidnapping of his little girl causes his peaceful home life to be disrupted.TakenSo is his ex-wifeTaken 2), who’s then murdered in Taken 3. Oder his son is killed (Cold PursuitHe loses his job.The CommuterOr, his family continues to live without himUnknown). Neeson makes it clear that the long-buried history and clinically successful violence in each case is revealed. He spends about two hours making criminal elements regret their decision to target a man in his 60s. Memory is the latest of these films, and at first, it seems like it’s capable of subverting the formula. It then settles down into a tired imitation.

Memory begins with a slight inversion of the Neeson Action Formula: This time, he’s one of the bad guys, kind of. Neeson is Alex Lewis. He plays a top-notch assassin and takes on jobs from the worst offenders in the world. When he’s asked to do the one thing you never ask an action hero to do — kill a kid — Neeson turns on his employers. As he becomes a vigilante determined to make them pay, he’s hunted by both sides, with criminals and law enforcement coming at him along the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. His chief pursuer: FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), who’s after the same guys Alex is.

Memory’s big swerve is that Alex is in a race against time. His health is deteriorating, and he’s suffering from memory loss, a harbinger of severe cognitive decline to come. This means he isn’t just out to punish a crime syndicate for crossing a line; he’s trying to symbolically atone for a life of ill-gotten gains while he’s still capable of taking meaningful action.

Liam Neeson holds a man up by the color in the film Memory.

By itself, MemoryIt is competently done, but a dull thriller. Martin Campbell, the Journeyman director has consistently delivered thrilling action sequences in movies ranging from ordinary (the 2006 James Bond reboot) to extraordinary. Casino Royale) to surprising (Jackie Chan’s 2017 TakenRef. The Foreigner) to forgettable (2021’s Maggie Q vehicle The Protégé). An actual example of what actually happens MemoryCampbell is more concerned with ineffective melodrama this time than physical conflict, so it’s clearly a less successful Campbell film. Liam Neeson’s promise in an action film about Liam Neeson is that he will commit shocking acts of cruelty. MemoryAs Alex threatens to inflict violence on a lot people, he only sometimes commits any.

Neeson reads as if he’s operating in the same mode of desperate competence he originally perfected in Taken. Yet in Memory, the thrill is gone — his intensity is no longer surprising, and as committed as Neeson is to remaining onscreen and present for most of his character’s stunts, his limitations appear more apparent than usual, given Campbell’s clear shot blocking and the clean cuts that stitch the film’s action scenes together so neatly. These two men are the biggest problem in filmmaking. You can also good at their jobs, so one’s commitment overexposes the others’ shortcomings.

More compelling is Guy Pearce’s weary Agent Serra, who at times serves as the de facto protagonist when Memory’s script demands that Alex disappear for a while. Serra’s investigation into Alex’s criminal employers is the one place where Memory makes anything approaching a compelling statement, even if it’s a shopworn one about the institution of law enforcement and the ways it’s used to enforce the status quo more than to find justice.

Guy Pearce in an FBI jacket wields a pistol and a flashlight in the film Memory.

Memorization’s most fascinating aspect ultimately lies outside of the film itself, if it’s read as a meta-commentary on Neeson’s action oeuvre. As Alex, Neeson is portraying a man who knows he can’t continue being the kind of person Neeson has played across so many movies. The film plays better — but only slightly — if viewers consider the comments Neeson made in early 2021 about being ready to retire from this kind of film after only a few more (presumably MemoryAnd his upcoming thriller Retribution).

Neeson was a typical example of upper-class white male rage in many of his films. His dissonance between the well-mannered persona and the brutality of these characters is what made him an action-star in his later years. His sonorous voice — which has led to a long voice-acting career and frequent casting in mentor-type roles — doesn’t belie the brutality these characters all eventually give way to. Under this reading, Neeson’s action movies are about the order whiteness and wealth has imposed on the world, the male sense of entitlement to that order, and the violence lurking beneath it, aimed at anyone who tries to disrupt it. The film “The Beginning” was the first. Taken, and it’s no coincidence that most of these films are incited by a man feeling robbed.

Liam Neeson stalks through tall grass with an assault rifle in Memory

This is curious, because these films are never about the theft of possessions — they’re about losing other people and losing status. The lives of his many characters’ loved ones are on the line, but often so is the sense of possession and control these men felt over their lives. All of them feel a sense ownership over their families, their jobs and the right to kill others.

Memory is not Liam Neeson’s final action film, and it won’t be the one that defines him. But it’s worth considering as his tenure of mannered cinematic vengeance slowly comes to a close. In this case, it’s with a character suddenly attempting to atone for the man he’s been, right before his own history evaporates from his mind. It isn’t terribly convincing — even though Alex Lewis confesses that he’s been a bad guy, MemoryIt is still built on the excitement of watching that bad guy get his revenge. There is little that suggests Alex Lewis is all that different from Bryan in the Taken movies, or any of Neeson’s other violent avatars. It’s worth remembering this era of cinema, and everything it says about specifically male fantasies and male rage. But it isn’t necessarily worth remembering Memory itself.

MemoryOn April 29, the movie opens in cinemas.

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