It’s Thursday morning and I am starting to write this review of Blacklight before I’ve actually seen the movie. Why? Because it’s a Liam Neeson action thriller. It’s yet another movie where he plays a man with a particular set of skills who somehow finds himself caught in the middle of some crime or conspiracy. Why? Because there is a two and a half minute trailer that feels like the CliffsNotes version of the movie. Why? Because as much as I love Liam Neeson, these mindless excursions of his are beginning to get a little stale. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking. They were stale seven years go with Taken 3. I just have a higher tolerance for such things.)
From the trailer, we already have a pretty good idea as to where this is going. Liam Neeson is an aging agent who wants out in order to be able to spend some quality time with the family he’s neglected due to his commitments to the country. He stumbles upon a conspiracy of epic proportions – which I can only assume involves an unrecognizable Aidan Quinn thinking he’s J. Edgar Hoover – and has to uncover the truth and take down the bad guy, all while racing against the clock to save his daughter and granddaughter.
Blacklight looks like pretty standard fare. And its success or failure as a movie depends entirely on how much heart and how much hurt there is in this movie. If Neeson is all in, then we’re going to have a good time at the movies.
Neeson Was Not All In!
It’s Thursday afternoon now. I have seen Blacklight and can tell you that Liam Neeson totally phoned this performance in.
There was no intrigue. The action sequences were perfunctory at best. (They were edited together better in that trailer.) And there was absolutely no racing against time to save his family. Yes, they disappeared for some of the movie, but it didn’t feel like they were in any real danger. Neeson’s character, Travis Block (awful fucking name by the way), is saddled with OCD, but none of it has anything to do with anything that happens in Blacklight.
The plot, if we can call it that, is exactly as it is outlined in the trailer. The movie opens with the hit-and-run murder of a young, charismatic activist that bears a striking resemblance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This too has nothing to do with the rest of the movie except to set up the fact that someone politically contentious has been killed under mysterious circumstances. Writers Nick May and Mark Williams (who is also the director and producer) are shameless enough to lift from the headlines, but aren’t brave enough to follow through with any of it.
Blacklight is going for 1970s paranoia flick (see: Three Days of the Condor) but it’s so haphazard and messy that it just comes off as a piss poor imitation. It’s like the writers saw The Parallax View or The Manchurian Candidate a long time ago, couldn’t remember exactly what happened in those movies, but nevertheless thought about how relevant they still are, and tried to contemporize them in the most superficial way possible.
If you’re telling a story that is rooted in the idea that the government is out to get you, then surely the basic principle is to make it as close to reality as possible. You want the version of the world in your movie to be only slightly askew. You want the audience to believe that everything happening on screen is within the realm of possibility. You want them to buy into the paranoia.
Blacklight fails to do any of that.
Not Enough Punchy Punchy Stabby Shooty
This is such lazy filmmaking that none of the characters come close to resembling anything real. The journalists here are caricatures. The big bad guy has no rationale or motivations for any of this evil actions. And I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s now how OCD works. Even the most cursory search on Google would have helped May and Williams craft characters that felt a little more believable.
But Blacklight’s biggest sin, however, was that there just wasn’t the kind of relentless, brutal, revenge fantasy action that we’ve come to expect, nay, demand, from a Liam Neeson movie. There was some punching. There was some shooting. But none of it felt satisfying. In fact, it would have been easier to look past this movie’s narrative shortcomings if it gave us some of that escapism instead.
Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For?
Now, I like to think of myself as something of a Liam Neeson connoisseur. Ever since 2008’s Taken, I have made a point of watching every movie in which he plays a government agent, an ex-government agent, a marine, an ex-marine, an assassin, a hitman, an ex-hitman, a mobster, a thief, a truck driver, or any combination of any of those character archetypes. These movies can charitably be described as a mixed bag. Taken (Great!), Unknown (Average), The Grey (Thrilling), Taken 2 (Meh), Non-Stop (Tense), A Walk Among the Tombstones (Noir-licious), Taken 3 (Enough!), Run All Night (Satisfying), The Commuter (Huh?), Cold Pursuit (Entertaining), Honest Thief (Predictable), The Ice Road (Educational), and The Marksman (Boring).
Blacklight might just be worst one yet.
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