Knowing, as we do, that Liam Neeson has made a truckload of action thrillers over the last 15 years or so—and knowing that even when those movies aren’t great, it’s fun to watch the actor take his revenge on the people who’ve wronged him—knowing those things, a person might understandably be a tiny bit excited about a movie called Retribution, if for no other reason than some good ol’ B-movie Neeson-style vengeance.
But it’s not even clear by the end of the film what the title is referring to, and it’s certainly not about Neeson exacting retribution for anything, and so the movie’s entire raison d'être goes out the window. The window of an SUV, that is, because that’s where we spend nearly the entire film: Neeson is a high-powered bank executive who tosses his kids into his car one day, starts driving, and then gets a mysterious phone call telling him he’s sitting on a bomb with a pressure sensor, and if he gets out of the SUV or doesn’t follow the voice’s directions, it’ll explode. So, Neeson drives.
And, without exaggeration, in this car is where we spend the rest of the movie. But if you’re hoping for something like the bus in Speed here, look elsewhere, as director Nimród Antal does basically nothing to place us in any kind of space outside the car, and so we can’t ratchet up the tension there, and neither does he create any kind of claustrophobia from spending so much time inside the SUV, because that doesn’t even appear to have occurred to him. Neeson, for his part, is a consummate professional, and he goes a lot harder than we might expect given what he’s working with.
There is one thing Retribution does well, and I mean this, although I think it’s unintentional—we do kind of get an idea of how irritating it would be to be stuck in a car with a bomb under your seat, two kids in the back, and a voice insisting you follow vague and confusing directions. That Neeson doesn’t say, “Enough already,” get out, and end it all, is a true testament to human perseverance.
Retribution is in theaters.
