BEFORE: I'm posting late today, this is my Sunday film and I watched it LATE on Sunday night, not early on Sunday morning, because I had to be at the theater at 8:30 this morning to open up, for the last day of the NY International Children's Film Festival. Then I was home by 6:00 pm but really needed a two-hour nap, because then came watching "Tournament of Champions" with my wife, this is a MUST-SEE TV event in our household. Really just four more work days this week, then we're off on a vacation next week. Can't wait.
Liam Neeson carries over from "Honest Thief", and this makes 6 Neeson movies in a row, which means he's tied with Allison Janney for the lead this year. I think you know where this is going...
THE PLOT: Travis Block is a government operation coming to terms with his shadowy past. When he discovers a plot targeting U.S. citizens, Block finds himself in the crosshairs of the FBI director he once helped protect.
AFTER: Neeson plays a man here with another special set of skills, namely he goes out in the field to rescue FBI agents who are deep undercover, and either their cover's been blown and their lives are endangered, or they're so deep that they've sort of forgotten who they really are and therefore see the world in a different way, so they need to be retrieved and re-programmed, so to speak. We have know way if this is a common problem in real life, or if the FBI employs one special person to go retrieve these people. But that's the main problem here, none of us in the audience know what really goes down at the FBI, however for a screenwriter there's an opportunity to write just about anything, and we can't really say that doesn't happen. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it? For that matter, I don't know if there's really a type of car bomb that goes under someone's seat and prevents them from leaving the car without causing an explosion, so I've got no choice, I've got to roll with that plot point. Twice.
The director of the FBI uses Travis Block for this purpose, and of course he's got weapons experience and demolitions experience, because every Liam Neeson character does, even the ones he played in "Ordinary Love" and "Made in Italy". JK. Block and the FBI director served together in the military, so they go way back - which eventually becomes a problem when Block learns his buddy has a secret project called "Operation Unity". Here the screenwriters get another pass, because they never really have to get around to telling us what Operation Unity does, we only need to know that it's bad, and several people have been killed already because they got too close to it. Or the whole project is about killing U.S. civilians if they know too much about something else, honestly it's all not very clear.
The other special skill that Block has is that read-the-room power, haven't seen it in a while, but every spy and assassin movie was using it back around 2015-2018, they even gave the Ben Affleck Batman that power. It's the ability to quick assess a dangerous situation, and then use whatever is handy to take down the 10 men who are attacking, including making them shoot each other with their own guns, climbing walls parkour style and fashioning a makeshift bomb out of two propane tanks and a flare. It's sort of MacGyver-ish but it also pertains to hand-to-hand combat, not just quickly building improvised devices. Anyway, Block has that so no how many FBI agents they send after him, you know he's going to come out on top because he can electrify the wet floor or use a handy grenade launcher to blow up a car.
Block also has some form of OCD, I'm not sure if that logically goes hand-in-hand with the reading the room skill, but it's very useful that he always checks how many exits he has whenever he's in a new location, however he also has to do some actions three times repetitively in order to stop the phrases that are going around and around in his mind. Hey, whatever works, you can't argue with results, and we understand he's doing a bunch of high-stress tasks in his high-stress job that is totally off the books so nobody will ever know about it.
After he loses track of Dusty Crane, one of the undercover operatives he was sent to get, and Dusty escapes from him twice and causes a lot of damage trying to get away in a funny-looking garbage truck (this was filmed in Australia, with Melbourne standing in for Washington, DC, in case you were wondering) he starts wondering what the connection is between Crane and Operation Unity. Crane manages to contact an investigative reporter and tells her that the political candidate's death was not an accident, however Crane is then shot by other agents, and Block has to put all the pieces together after the fact, with the help of the reporter.
It doesn't help that Block's daughter and grand-daughter are put into witness protection, they disappear from their work and school with no forwarding address, and Block can't locate them. Which is a little weird because they know nothing, they're not witnesses in any case, the FBI just wanted to use them as bargaining chips (hostages) to convince Block to stop looking into things. But you know he's come too far just to come that far, right? He can't quit the agency, either, because he was never officially hired there. Ooh, curse that technicality, but that is also some very funky logic. Really, he could just drop things, go try and find his family that was "Taken" from him, and forget about exposing the shenanigans going on at the FBI. Nah, he was probably right the first time.
So instead he kills so many dirty FBI agents that they basically run out of agents to send at him, which enables him to hold his boss at gunpoint to find the dirt on the secret operations. Yeah, that should work, then he can clear his name and quit the job and there will probably not be any repercussions from that in the future at all. Sure, you can wait for a big twist here, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is coming.
Directed by Mark Williams (also carrying over from "Honest Thief")
Also starring Aidan Quinn (last seen in "The Handmaid's Tale"), Taylor John Smith (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Emmy Raver-Lampman (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Claire van der Boom, Yael Stone (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Andrew Shaw, Zac Lemons, Gabriella Sengos, Tim Draxl, Georgia Flood, Caroline Brazier, Mel Jarnson, Joe Petruzzi, Todd Levi, Andriana Williams (last seen in "Honest Thief"), Yesse Spence, Anita Torrance, Irene Chen, Luka Sero, Clara Helms, Dailin Gabrielle, Rodney Miller.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of wine shot up by FBI agents
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