Unfortunately, having an unusually good Neeson performance really only ends up serving to exaggerate the degree to which nobody else in the cast is even a little bit tolerable. Having a well-defined sense of guilt and a desperate desire to love and be love gives him some genuine meat to work with, and he turns in one of the more openly emotive performances he's ever given in this mode. Setting aside the film itself, this is the best he personally has been in a B-grade thriller in the better part of a decade, at least. It is possible to imagine this exact film working fairly well with strong, interesting characters, and the reason it is possible to imagine is that Neeson himself is giving us an incongruously good performance. But one cannot talk so angrily that it takes the place of even a moderately good chase scene, in a film where the talking was never going to be all that good in the first place.Īt is best - and, for that matter, at its worst - Honest Thief is pure cops-and-robbers boilerplate, with exactly the conversations and plot beats movies of this sort will have, and that's neither good nor bad. Talking very angrily, to be clear: everybody is shouting and snarling at everyone else, and making threats, and all that sort of thing. The film is astonishingly light on action sequences, or any kind of thriller material at all an unexpectedly high percentage of its running time (it is, thankfully, not a long film, at 99 minutes) is made up of people talking to each other in offices or over the phone. Somehow, this proves to be beyond the means of Honest Thief, its director Mark Williams (making his second feature, after the 2016 Gerard Butler vehicle A Family Man), and his co-writer Steve Allrich. So that leaves the Liam Neeson Action Thriller route: lots of car chases, gun battles, Neeson punching Jai Courtney in his supremely forgettable face, a big threatening speech so Neeson gets one chance to remind us that he is, in fact, an excellent actor. The one that was never going to happen would be to lean into the Kafka-esque black comedy of a man who wants to atone for his sins being unable to navigate the corrupt bureaucracy that he needs to atone through, and it would require a top-to-bottom rewrite. There are two ways to play this, I think. And of course, Tom's one likely ally, Annie, is not at all happy to learn that the man she's about to move in with has been lying to her this whole time, meaning that not only does he have to stay ahead of the police, he also needs to salvage his relationship at the same time. He's able to convince them so well, in fact, that Nivens decides to steal all the money for himself and frame Tom for Baker's murder, putting the honest thief on the run from the dirty cops. And while agents Sam Baker (Robert Patrick) and Sean Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan), running the In-and-Out Bandit case, assume he's just the latest in a line of cranks, he's able to convince their underlings, agents John Nivens (Jai Courtney) and Ramon Hall (Anthony Ramos), that he's legit, and sincere. ![]() He reaches out to the FBI and offers to turn himself in, along with every last penny he stole, on the condition that he receives a reduced sentence, to minimise the amount of time he must abandon Annie. ![]() ![]() For he can't keep himself from flirting the woman working the desk at the storage facility, Annie Wilkins (Kate Walsh), and she flirts right back, and as we flash-forward a year, they're so very much in love that Tom has decided that if he's going to be the man he wants to be for her, he needs to purge himself of his sins. But one day, while moving a portion of that money into a self-storage unit, everything changes. He's known to the media and the police as the In-and-Out Bandit, such a monstrously terrible name that it's even made fun of in the dialogue, and in this he has stolen something in the vicinity of $9 million over the years. Neeson is, of course, the honest thief, Tom Dolan of Boston, Massachusetts. The subjective, simplistic word "boring" is the single worst one for any critic to ever use about any art object, because it doesn't really mean anything, but here we are: Honest Thief is extraordinarily boring, surely the most boring of all the thrillers that Neeson has headlined since redefining his career with 2008's Taken, and a steady contender for the worst-made on top of it (though 2014's Taken 3 at least makes that latter one a competitive race). Not a high bar, and yet somehow, Honest Thief does not succeeded in clearing it. There's only really thing a late-career Liam Neeson action movie has to do, which is show Liam Neeson engaged with the business of doing action.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |