Liam Neeson in Retribution
RETRIBUTION
In an early episode of The West Wing, White House Press Secretary CJ Cregg references a visiting Middle Eastern royal with 38 wives: “Imagine being the girl he dated that he didn't marry.”
That quote came to me following my screening of Liam Neeson's new revenge thriller Retribution, because good Lord – if these are the projects the star keeps accepting, can you imagine how bad the ones he turns down must be?
Maybe this particular material plays better in Spanish. Or German. Or Korean. Directed by Nimród Antal, Retribution is based on Spain's 2015 film El desconocido, which was subsequently remade as Germany's Don't. Get. Out! in 2018 and South Korea's Hard Hit in 2021. One has to presume these are countries with no access to Speed, given that Neeson's latest cinematic headache is like Jan de Bont's peerless bomb-on-a-bus blockbuster if everyone involved went brain-dead at the exact same time. I was fortunate enough to catch the movie with a buddy who similarly loathes Neeson's irony-deprived action oeuvre, and we were not-so-secretly hoping to witness the most profoundly ridiculous release of the year. For my money, it didn't quite happen; that feature-length Celine Dion infomercial Love Again pretty much had the title sewn up the moment it debuted. But if you, too, wind up at Retribution for reasons beyond simply wanting, and expecting to get, a good time, know that you might actually have a great time, at least if you also have a friend with you to share inappropriate giggles and expressions of “WTF?!?” disbelief.
Here, Neeson plays Matt Turner, an investment banker so work-obsessed that he barely has time for his obnoxious children (Lilly Aspell and Jack Champion) and his clearly fed-up wife Heather, played by Neeson's Schindler's List scene partner Embeth Davidz. (While it's nice seeing them together under less-harrowing circumstances, and Davidz is reliably beguiling, no actress has ever been less convincing as a Heather.) For reasons never addressed, this all-American nuclear family is residing in Berlin, where Matt answers to an American boss (Matthew Modine) and has an American business ally (Arian Moayed). The film's only other significant on-screen character is Norma Dumezweni's no-nonsense police chief, and she's British. What precisely is going on here? Did the entire nation of Germany hear that Neeson was at it again and collectively opt for an extended vacation in Switzerland?
But I digress … chiefly because even lunatic digressions make more sense than Retribution's plotting. Anyhoo, Matt is strong-armed into driving his squabbling, petulant kids to school when an iPhone rings – a device not belonging to Matt, Heather, or the hateful brats in the backseat. After warily picking up the phone with its thematically irrelevant “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” ringtone, Matt hears an electronically altered voice informing him that a motion-detecting explosive is attached inside his car, and that if Matt doesn't stay in the vehicle and do the caller's bidding, the bomb will detonate. So it's a lot like Speed, except Matt can slow down. He can even stop. And there's no Keanu or Sandra around to make the silliness go down easier.
What we instead get in this excitement-free outing by director Antal (it's tempting to solely refer to him as Nimród) and screenwriter Chris Salmanpour is one laughably moronic narrative turn after another, punctuated only by conceits so illogical as to appear deranged. (Matt's kids are understandably freaked out by the bomb, but that panic is nothing compared to the denial and tears they unleash when learning that Mom and Dad – whose unhappiness can't possibly be fresh news – may be getting a divorce.) Among the movie's more stunning idiocies, I was especially awed by the cops' inability to find a parked car conspicuously missing all four of its doors; the unexplained, apparently generic protest march that impeded Matt's travels; and the shrieking apoplexy of Moayed's Sylvain and his unnamed female companion, considering the film forgot to introduce them before asking us to care about their mortal peril. Nothing quite tickled my friend and me, though, more than the sight of Matt, now a suspected terrorist, driving through a comically endless Berlin tunnel and finding a full police squad blocking his exit. Those officers might've had more luck stopping Matt's car had they thought to block both lanes of traffic rather than just the one.
Ever since Neeson's emergence, in 2008's Taken, as Hollywood's go-to guy for the headlining of dopey action thrillers with interchangeably inane premises, we've been deluged with these things – at one point, between the debuts of Honest Thief and The Marksman, getting two within a three-month stretch. (Granted, that was between October of 2020 and January of '21, when the few cineplexes that were open appeared willing to book anything.) A handful of these titles, specifically the masterful Cold Pursuit, are decent. Most of them aren't. Yet I remain astounded by how much focus and gravitas, for our benefit, Neeson continues to pour into even his most wretched endeavors. With its grating dialogue, uninspired stunt and chase choreography, utter lack of emotional investment, and “surprise” villain whose identity seemed evident from the first trailer, Retribution is unfailingly awful. Try telling that to Neeson, however – or at least Neeson at the time of filming.
After so many “non-stop adrenaline ride”s of this sort (to borrow the movie's marketing phrase), few would begrudge its headlining 71-year-old for merely going through the motions, and Neeson himself probably wasn't that disappointed to learn that he'd only be standing during the first 15 minutes of his latest showcase. (In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey discusses former SNL hosts whose unsought advice on bettering their material “usually involved their characters talking more, or in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more.”) But Retribution's raison d'etre is clearly doing his damnedest – shaking, pleading, bellowing with the thunder of Zeus – to convince us that Antal's ludicrous offering is tense and scary and boasts legitimate stakes. Even if this means that we feel more embarrassed for the star than usual, his fearsome commitment in a void is also something to admire. It's hardly Neeson's fault that this time, and yet again, it's his audience who's being taken.
GOLDA
Directed by Guy Nattiv and written by Nicholas Martin, the biographical drama Golda explores the front-line horrors and, more thoroughly, behind-the-scenes maneuvering that ultimately ended the 19-day Yom Kippur War between Israeli and Arabic forces in the fall of 1973. For 2023 audiences, though, and with no disrespect meant toward those who endured the central conflict or continue to endure its ramifications, Nattiv's movie may be more expressly about smoking, because even this regretful practitioner of numerous decades thought twice about lighting up after the screening ended. (My resolve lasted almost a full minute.) With the chain-smoking Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (played here, under loads of facial and body prosthetics, by Helen Mirren) leading the charge, there are so, so many instances of political and military figureheads lighting one cigarette after another that the incessant clicks of metallic lighters and hoarse exhalations of smoke came to seem almost like grim aural comedy; important figures trying to end wartime death while slowly killing themselves. But this is a movie that, in a distressingly period-appropriate touch, even shows Golda smoking in her hospital bed while undergoing treatment for advanced lymphoma. I'd love to say that these scenes made me concerned for Meir's health. Taking into consideration what must've been dozens of takes over weeks of production, I found myself more concerned for Mirren's health.
All told, Nattiv's film is reasonably gripping, and quite excellent whenever demonstrating the pain of strategic failure; though we never meet any Israeli soldiers, and only hear their suffering through static-filled radio contact, it's entirely clear what their loss means to the devastated Meir and her eye-patched military chief David Elazar (a sensational Lior Ashkenazi). But the storytelling, with this material perhaps more suited to a long-form mini-series than a traditional two-hour feature, doesn't fill in enough blanks. Part of the problem, at least for some of us, may be purely visual, because I personally spent so much undue time searching for Helen Mirren beneath all that unduly heavy makeup that it took a long while to truly hear anything her Golda was saying. (While the facial prosthetics are admittedly superb, the faux Meir legs are less so – her ankles, such as they are, appear to be unnaturally spilling over her shoes.)
Yet the details behind the “Why?” of the Yom Kippur War are also left naggingly vague for those of us not adequately versed on the historical event, and although it's apparent that Meir desperately wants a victory for Israel, it's not precisely clear what victory might mean, for good and ill, regarding the country's friends and foes. Martin's script boasts a bevy of smart, sharp dialogue, but his script even glides over the basic functions of several characters. It wasn't until a post-screening Web search, for instance, that I knew for certain that the ever-present Lou (Camille Cottin) was Golda's trusted assistant, and not her daughter or late-in-life lover. (The latter would have been a considerable surprise, but then again, nothing about the film was telling me different.) Those well-acquainted with Meir's tenure as Prime Minister and the Yom Kippur War might well appreciate the cinematic shorthand, but I, for one, felt a bit like a student who realizes too late that he should have studied the suggested reading material in advance of the day's lecture. It also might've benefited the film, and given Mirren more notes to play, if we had seen more of Golda the way she appears in the included documentary footage near the end – joking with and cajoling Anwar Sadat in order to fool the press, to fool all of us, into thinking of them as lovable grandparents having a momentary squabble over their kids' inheritances.
Still, despite my occasional confusion and dissatisfaction, I would hardly dissuade anyone from seeing Golda. Given that she's now of an age, and carries enough regal stature, to be treated more as an icon than an actor, Mirren isn't given enough opportunities these days to demonstrate her chameleonic gifts. Yet she fits perfectly in Meir's overstuffed shoes, delivering an arresting blend of bluntness and tenderness, and there's no denying her Golda's passion-fueled intellect, especially when paired against the expert Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger. (For what it's worth, Schreiber is allowed to portray Kissinger without any distracting prosthetics whatsoever.) Between Mirren and the other topnotch performers and the many moving sequences of triumph and tragedy, I was continually absorbed by the film. Not nearly as absorbed, however, as a nearby patron at my Friday-afternoon screening, who repeatedly, joyfully pounded on his seat's tray table with every pro-Israel sentiment, and who raised a fist of solidarity with every demonstrated Jewish victory. A couple of patrons at our screening applauded at the end, but this man was the only one I heard, when the credits began rolling, audibly say, “Wow.” I'm glad the Golda movie exists. I'm achingly glad the movie exists for him.
THE HILL
Right after the title of the pro-faith baseball bio-pic The Hill appears on-screen, it's followed by the film's unofficial subtitle: The Story of Rickey Hill. That subtitle, in turn, is followed by this genre's obligatory title card “Based on a true story.” There was already so much redundancy in these first 12 words that it almost seemed like overkill when the top-billed performer turned out to be Dennis Quaid, who, of course, will forever be known to baseball-drama fans as the star of 2002's The Rookie. But overkill is sadly the name of the game in this (sigh) well-meaning yet (deeper sigh) depressingly phony “inspirational” melodrama that turns all of the complex past into a gauzy Normal Rockwell painting, and that so blatantly steals from other, less offensively winsome baseball flicks that I quietly hoped a class-action lawsuit was in the offing.
I say this, perhaps disingenuously, as a major fan of Barry Levinson's similarly glossy 1984 classic The Natural, as well as a big fan of Moneyball, and Field of Dreams, and Eight Men Out, and The Bad News Bears, and Bull Durham, and A League of Their Own, and … . Wait: Is The Hill the first baseball movie I haven't enjoyed? (Answer: Hardly.) Yet director Jeff Celantano's offering, with its script by sports-drama specialists Angelo “Hoosiers and Rudy” Pizzo and the late Scott Marshall “When the Game Stands Tall” Smith, is so relentlessly lump-in-the-throat without valid reason that I became uncomfortably incensed by the finely scrubbed fakery of it all. Considering the 1960s-'70s time-frame and rural-Texas geography, I suppose I can forgive the white-as-Wonder The Hill for featuring all of two black characters, one of whom is baseball tyro Rickey Hill's only non-familial supporter as a youth, the other a domestic who, over the course of her only two lines, calls the nine-year-old “Sir.” Yet legitimately nothing about this purported “true story” with a spiritual message came off as believable, let alone factual, and I was frankly flabbergasted by some of the clichés its creators chose to include, even when they weren't remotely necessary. When the impoverished Hill family's truck got a flat tire after they were bullied out of town and a clan member muttered “It could be worse,” I instinctively muttered Marty Feldman's Igor line from Young Frankenstein: “It could be raining!” And then it rained. When there wasn't previously a cloud in the clear-blue sky.
Because a number of viewers at my well-attended Saturday matinée seemed to vocally enjoy this thing, a movie that's like The Natural without Barbara Hershey or remote plausibility, I'll refrain from giving it the thrashing I feel it deserves. I'll concede that adult Rickey Hill portrayer Colin Ford – an earnest, touching performer who, at certain angles, looks uncannily like a young Robert Redford – is welcome company, as is Siena Bjonerud as Rickey's girlfriend and Mason Gillett as his brother in the 1960s scenes. I also adored seeing the movie's late-arrival talent scout played by the eternally wily Scott Glenn, partly because I was thrilled to realize that the actor was still alive, and mostly because, despite his distressingly yet understandably frail countenance, he can still command a screen like few other character actors of the last 50 years. (Would it have killed the filmmakers, though, for even one shot of Glenn interacting with Quaid, his The Right Stuff co-star of 40 years ago?)
But in its telling of Rickey Hill's triumph in overcoming at-birth spinal damage to eventually secure a four-year tenure in professional minor-league baseball, The Hill continually thwarts whatever goodwill you're willing to lend it. Little Rickey comes close to escaping his leg braces in the manner of Forrest Gump. He incessantly hits stones and baseballs with a precision and power to make The Natural's Roy Hobbs weep with envy. (And Rickey doesn't have a soaring Randy Newman score egging him on – just a makeshift one courtesy of composer Geoff Zanelli.) He has an aggressively truth-spouting Meemaw enacted by Bonnie Bedelia, whom it would be a delight to see if she weren't offering an homage to Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy, and if the 75-year-old wasn't playing the mother-in-law to 69-year-old Quaid. And Quaid himself? Playing Rickey's stern father, he looks weirdly older in the '60s sequences than he does in the '70s sequences, and his overwrought performance never begins to make sense. His Pastor Hill may be occasionally revered by his kids (they buy him a fast-food cheeseburger with their meager savings!), but Quaid is more obviously The Hill's villain, refusing to attend even one of his child's baseball games until, wouldn't you know it, the finale's Big Game. With this maddeningly derivative and fraudulent movie, the glowing image of Dennis Quaid on the poster may be enough to get Rookie fans into the theater, but it's also kind of like advertising The Natural with a gleaming poster image of Robert Duvall.
