Plot: An aging gangster attempts to reconnect with his children and rectify the mistakes in his past, but the criminal underworld won’t loosen their grip willingly.
Review: Over the last sixteen years, Liam Neeson has consistently delivered a string of variations on his 2008 hit Taken. Outside of a handful of exceptions, the Oscar-nominated actor has made movie after movie about cops and soldiers using their particular sets of skills to take down bad guys who underestimate the elderly protagonist. As those projects have begun to blur together, Neeson has had some tricks up his sleeve with voice work in The Lego Movie, comedic turns in A Million Ways To Die In The West, and the occasional big-budget offering. The ones that utilize Neeson’s gravitas and everyman demeanor have stood out from the over fifty projects he has acted on or voiced during that span. You can add Absolution to that shortlist. A powerful drama about criminals and the ramifications of aging, Absolution is easily one of Liam Neeson’s best performances and one that elevates what could have been a B-movie into something more.
Absolution stars Neeson as a nameless enforcer referred to in the credits as Thug. Thug has worked for three decades for a gangster named Charlie Connor (Ron Perlman) and is mentoring his son Kyle (Daniel Diemer) to take over the family business. Thug begins to notice memory lapses that range from forgetting his address to his son’s name. A former boxer, Thug learns his memory loss is advanced and irreversible. As he tries to reconnect with his daughter Daisy (Frankie Shaw) and his grandson Tre, Thug questions his life and the relationships he ignored in favor of dedicating his life to criminal work. He also begins a casual romance with a nameless Woman (Yolonda Ross) who accepts Thug as he is despite his line of work and his diminishing mental capacity. Thug also reflects on the impact of his work when he gets involved with a sex trafficking ring. None of it is glamorous, and all of it has repercussions.
Liam Neeson has often played over-the-hill characters, but none are quite like Thug. There is a rueful and sad quality as we see Neeson putter around his half-empty home, hitting himself in the head for not remembering things. He has a notepad full of addresses and names he keeps forgetting, most of which have not happened in the line of duty. Thug visits a doctor, a priest, and his family as he thinks about what to do next. Absolution captures the depression of losing your mind in several somber moments but goes a bit too on-the-nose when Thug dreams of himself in a boat with his dead father, pondering his fate. There is a mix of voice-over, poignant monologues, and emotionally brutal honesty mixed in with a couple of moments of violence. Absolution avoids the action movie tropes in favor of more dramatic ones, but the few bursts of violence are intense without trying to emulate prior Neeson vehicles. Neeson spends more time gruffly questioning himself rather than kicking ass.
What is most striking about Absolution is the balance between the criminal elements and the personal impacts on Thug’s life. Liam Neeson has to vacillate between being a hard customer who can kill with abandon while trying to reconcile with his daughter before he loses control of himself. Neeson is soft when talking to Frankie Shaw, and she pushes back on the absentee father in her life. As much as Yolonda Ross’ character tries to forge a relationship with Neeson’s Thug, he cannot bring himself to open up to someone, knowing it has an unknown end date. There are some uneven elements, such as Thug’s mental state leading to a rift in his personal life and, in turn, generating the key part of the conflict that serves as the film’s closing act. This segue allows Thug to tie up loose ends but at the cost of leaving some tangents and subplots built over the preceding acts off-screen. It is a minor issue that could have used a stronger conclusion.
Writer Tony Gayton has some solid credits, including the underappreciated The Salton Sea starring Val Kilmer and AMC’s western series Hell on Wheels. Gayton knows how to write criminals and their world well with solid dialogue and monologues that never sound rote or out of place. Absolution marks the second collaboration between Liam Neeson and director Hans Petter Moland. The duo’s 2019 action movie Cold Pursuit is firmly ensconced in the formula of a Neeson Season feature. Cold Pursuit does stand out from some of Neeson’s other action projects as more fun and entertaining than most but is starkly different than the elegiac tone of Absolution. Moland’s Norwegian films share more in common with this movie, notably his dark comedy A Somewhat Gentle Man starring Stellan Skarsgard, which deals with an older protagonist dealing with the hurdles of aging. Neeson and Moland have a solid working relationship that crosses genres, and I would like to see what they do next.
Absolution will not please fans of Liam Neeson’s action-heavy projects but does earn a spot alongside the actor’s better recent films, including In The Land of Saints and Sinners. Neeson’s film Memory treads some similar territory but with a different tone and style. Memory and Absolution make an interesting double feature, with one being a decidedly by-the-numbers action vehicle and the other a dramatic crime film with an emotional center. Absolution surprised me as the trailers do not do it justice. It does show that no matter how many similar movies he makes each year, Liam Neeson is still a masterful actor when given the right material. It also shows how the lead actor can single-handedly elevate a decent movie to a very good one.
Absolution opens in theaters on November 1st.
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