retribution: punishment inflicted on someone as vengeance for a wrong or criminal act.

In Retribution, Neeson plays Matt Turner, a financial advisor who works for an investment firm in Berlin.  (The city, pretty as it is, plays no role in the plot.)  Matt is an absentee husband who barely acknowledges his lovely wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz), choosing to focus on work instead.  He’s no better as a father, only interacting with his handsome kids Emily (Lilly Aspell) and Zach (Jack Champion) to yell at them and/or boss them around.  The kids don’t like each other either, insulting and hitting each other as only spoiled rich kids can do.  The Turner family is clearly dysfunctional.  Thankfully, some shared family trauma will help them all reconnect before the day ends.

Matt’s firm has recently experienced some turbulence, and his partner Anders (Matthew Modine) begs him to call a longtime investor who’s lost millions and is getting skittish.  (How I wish I could relate to that guy’s problem.)  Of course this highly critical call must take place the very same morning Matt promised Heather he would take his kids to school.  After corralling an angry Zach walking to school into his car, Matt calls the investor to calm him down.  Yes, he lost money, Matt admits, but he must weather the storm, embrace the risk, etc.  Zach, who is only a teenager, sees right through his dad’s flim-flam act, but the investor completely falls for it.

Just when Matt is feeling better about things, a mystery phone planted in his car rings.  Matt answers and there’s an electronically distorted voice on the other end.  (Just once I’d love for the mysterious caller to use a voice filter other than the one that everyone has been using for decades.)  The voice tells Matt that there’s a bomb in the car–right under his seat–that is pressure-activated.  If he or his kids try to leave, the bomb goes off.  The voice says he’s watching Matt’s every move, so he better not try anything.  Is this movie Speed in a BMW?  Why, yes it is.  There’s no shame in copying one of the best action movies of all time.  There is shame in making one as silly as this one, though.

To prove they mean business, the voice forces Matt to watch one of his fellow partners get blown up.  (Message received.)  The voice then orders Matt to meet Anders and tell him to punch in the pass key necessary to transfer $208m in a Dubai account.  (Seemed crazy to me that that amount of money could be transferred using an app, but such is the world these days.)  After Anders enters his key, the voice tells Matt to shoot Anders using a gun conveniently placed in the glove compartment.  Matt refuses, and Anders’ car explodes.  

After reeling for a few seconds, an angry Matt drives his way through the city into a tunnel, where cell phone coverage is naturally blocked.  He then convinces a highly skeptical Europol agent named Brickmann (Noma Dumezweni) to get his kids out of the car.  With that accomplished, Matt decides it’s time to exact a little retribution on his tormentor.  (He is played by Liam Neeson, after all.)  When the two finally are together, the movie shamelessly uses several well-worn movie cliches, “the surprise killer” and “the talking killer”, to explain why everything happened in this movie.  Then, with time apparently running out on this production, the movie turns Matt into a seasoned Hollywood stunt car driver so that he can dispatch the voice as quickly (and ridiculously) as possible.

Ever since the release of 2008’s Taken, Liam Neeson has created a subgenre unto himself.  He typically plays a man whose humdrum life is suddenly upended by a hostile party (terrorists, kidnappers, wolves, etc.).  Members of his family are either threatened, taken hostage, killed or all of the above.  This forces Neeson’s reluctant character to spring into action and use his “special skills” to bust heads until his family (or what is left of it) is back home, safe and sound.  The appeal of these movies is simple:  he plays a good yet imperfect man who fails to protect those he loves but ultimately redeems himself by defeating the forces of evil.

The Neeson genre of movies are basically morality plays dressed up as Hollywood action movies, with Neeson as a stand-in for conservative family values who restores order by the end of the movie.  Retribution, as low-stakes as it is, does have decent production values and performances, especially Neeson’s.  There’s something about the way that he says lines like “I will kill you!” or “I’ll only give you the money face-to-face!” with his rough, Irish brogue that elevates them above their inherent mediocrity.  After hearing those lines, I definitely would want his one (old) man wrecking crew to do everything in his power to save me.

The problem with Retribution is that despite having a fully committed Neeson, the movie is undeniably a slapdash effort.  Everything that is implied by the movie from the outset, that Matt and his firm have been up to financial shenanigans, which would obviously lead to a disgruntled investor (or investors) to seek retribution on them.  The story is seemingly primed to make a statement about the corruption of global banking corporations and how average people deal with the fallout, but all of that is dismissed so that the movie could become a standard Liam Neeson action vehicle.  The way the movie chooses to tie everything together in the end is ridiculous.  A twist like the one movie tries to get away with only works when the story lays the groundwork for it.  This movie never bothers to do that, however, and the results give the movie a half-baked quality.  Which is a shame because the first half of the movie is decent.

Director Nimród Antal does an adequate job with the story he’s given to work with, and DP Flavio Martínez Labiano wisely leverages the (irrelevant) Berlin setting to make the movie look nice.  I liked Harry Gregson-Williams score, which reminded me of the Tangerine Dream scores from the early Eighties.  As for the performances, Neeson is fine, Davitz is good as the worried mother, and the kids have spunk.  Dumezweni has fun with her role, even though I suspected her character’s saucy attitude was a reflection of her incredulity at being in a movie this bad.  When Neeson began his career as a reluctant avenging dad, he was only 56.  He was 71 when Retribution was released and while he looks great for his age, the wear and tear on his personal genre is undeniable.  Perhaps he should think about a Leslie Nielson career change and try comedy.  Not Recommended.

Miniscule Analysis

Spoilers below…

The movie goes out of its way to include rioters into the plot, implying that perhaps someone among them is behind the bombings.  According to Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters, I expected that Zach’s girlfriend Mila (Emily Kusche) would be revealed as the voice and that the two of them were in cahoots to steal the firm’s money and distribute it to the poor (or what have you).  That would have been a better explanation for why she was tailing Matt’s car besides what the movie offers.  She knows where he goes to school, why not just meet him there?  Why follow so close that she couldn’t stop in time when Matt breaks unexpectedly?  Also, doesn’t she have school as well?  Don’t her parents care about her skipping school to ride off with her American boyfriend?

Honestly, anything would have been better than having Modine’s character return from the dead.  Ansel’s explanation for his actions, that he wants more money than what he’s already stolen from his clients, was idiotic.  I know, I know, the rich always want all the money, but Anders has already siphoned off millions.  He should just skip town and leave his friend Matt to deal with the consequences.  Instead, he plays mad bomber, risking being discovered.

When the movie brought Modine’s Anders back from certain death for the climax, it reminded me of another silly action thriller, Bruce Willis’ 1993 turkey Striking Distance.  Talk about achieving rarefied air.