Sixteen years after “Taken” made him the most improbable action star on the planet, Liam Neeson has finally announced that he’ll soon be retiring from the genre that made him famous all over again — a career move he plans to implement by the end of 2025. To judge by the latest of the fun(ish) but frequently disposable B pictures that the lanky Irishman has built into a one-man cottage industry, Neeson is stepping away from his schlock at just the right time.
It’s not that “Absolution” is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can. While even the most forgettable of his Redbox specials (see: 2022’s “Memory”) have found their own special way to iterate on the “aging tough guy with a deep growl and a soft heart” formula, “Absolution” — the third and final installment of Neeson’s very unofficial “Nouns Trilogy” — is the first of these films that fails to bring anything new to the equation. Anything, that is, aside from the lusciously Selleckian mustache that Neeson grew for the role, which is so big and bushy that it starts to seem like a bad disguise of some kind. Alas, there isn’t enough facial hair in the world to hide the fact at hand: This Mad Lib of a movie amounts to an extremely self-serious remix of the same old tropes that Neeson has already tortured to death. It’s like watching his last 20 action vehicles projected onto the same unmasked AMC screen all at once.
This isn’t even the first time in the last few years that Neeson has played a grizzled enforcer who turns against his employer after being diagnosed with a severe neurodegenerative disease. In “Absolution,” his character is an unnamed ex-boxer — the credits refer to him as “Thug” — who’s worked for the same low-level Boston crime lord (Ron Perlman as Mr. Conner) ever since he stepped out of the ring. He’s loyal, he’s old school, and his favorite hobbies include punching strangers at the local dive bar and posing in front of his seaside living room window as if he were trying to perform the idea of a gangster (or at least Michael Mann’s idea of a gangster).
Perhaps that’s because Thug has been losing his grip on his own identity, a byproduct of the severe but sneakily gradual CTE that boxing gave him as a parting gift. Raised by his father to believe that “being a pussy” is the gravest of all sins, Thug has kept his condition secret even to himself. He’s the kind of man who would rather die alone than live vulnerably, and we get the sense that “Absolution” will grant him that wish after giving its tragic hero one last chance to make good on the movie’s title. Maybe — and I’m just spitballing here — it will do that by leveraging Thug’s long history of violence to bust a human trafficking operation whose leader makes the fatal mistake of abducting a girl who’s close to Liam Neeson (or, in this case, a girl who Liam Neeson has met exactly twice).
The trick of Tony Gayton’s script — and what ostensibly sets “Absolution” apart from the other Neeson movies just like it — is the idea that Thug doesn’t always remember what he’s already forgotten. We know that he’s estranged from his adult daughter (Frankie Shaw, playing a stripper in a film that has a very pitiable view of sex work), and we know that her kid represents Thug’s best hope for righting his father’s wrongs, but his relationship with his own son — who died several years before this story begins — only comes into focus as it occurs to Thug. Broadly speaking, Thug realizes that cruelty might not be the best technique when it comes to raising a child, a clarity he achieves by having to babysit his boss’ resentful grown-up son.
If it sounds like there’s a lot and also nothing happening in this movie, well, there’s a reason for that (and I haven’t even mentioned the rough-and-tumble fling that Thug has with a drug-addicted woman he wins in a bar fight). No part of “Absolution” is weaker or more underdeveloped than Thug’s business dealings with Mr. Conner, which come to involve a priest and a contested stack of money. There’s a sense that “Absolution” isn’t entirely sure what kind of late career Liam Neeson vehicle it wants to be, or what role the (minimal but oft-threatened) action should play in it.
That confusion naturally traces back to director Hans Petter Moland, who previously helmed the best of Neeson’s recent films (“Cold Pursuit”), and came to this cottage industry via the European festival circuit rather than by climbing up the ranks of DTV American junk. Moland, in other words, is someone capable of and interested in elevating this material — of making something like “Absolution” feel like a real movie as opposed to just more grist for the mill. And you can feel him trying to do just that as this gray and blustery film sags deep into its second hour, its steel-eyed study of Thug’s decline all but completely undone by the Liam Neeson of it all.
Neeson’s performance isn’t the problem (he’s perfected this archetype and then some), but even the most probing moments reverberate with self-parody, and the film’s apparent mandate to make room for every one of the usual Neeson tropes ensures that “Absolution” can’t probe any of them all that deeply. Only one scene manages to make a real impression: The one where Thug advises his grandson to know when to walk away. It’s a lesson that Thug himself has learned in the hardest way imaginable, and one that Neeson seems to be heeding without a moment to spare.
Grade: C
Samuel Goldwyn Films will release “Absolution” in theaters on Friday, November 1.
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