BEFORE: Welcome back to Liam Neeson week, last year's St. Patrick's Day weekend was all about Brendan Gleeson and the three Irish animated films made Tomm Moore and Cartoon Saloon, then I followed up with "The Banshees of Inisherin", the most Irish set of movies. This year the focus is on fellow Irishman Neeson, and the Irishness should really kick in on 3/17. Of course.
We've got another Birthday SHOUT-out today, I took this into consideration when looking for how to schedule all these Neeson films, today is the birthday of Jai Courtney, born 3/15/86. Jai, I'm sorry that I confused you with Joel Courtney, who was in all three "Kissing Booth" movies, of course you were the guy in the "Divergent" series and who played Boomerang in two "Suicide Squad" movies and Bruce Willis' son in "A Good Day to Die Hard".
Man, doesn't it feel like March JUST started? Now here we are, halfway through the month. We'll be done with March before you know it, and then Liam Neeson will be sitting on top of the leaderboard and I'll be trying to work out a path from Easter to Mother's Day.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bandit" (Movie #4,894)
THE PLOT: Wanting to lead an honest life, a notorious bank robber turns himself in, only to be double-crossed by two ruthless FBI agents.
AFTER: Somewhere, somebody is working on a screenplay that will someday be made into a movie starring Liam Neeson as a former hitman or soldier, who goes on a vigilante crusade against a vicious gang of thugs that killed his girlfriend, Ruth. And that film will be called, of course, "Ruthless". It just always seems that his character's wife or girlfriend has been killed or kidnapped ("Taken") and he's got to go to extreme measures to get revenge, and I guess that somehow justifies all his not-nice actions and enables a film to have a bunch of explosions and cool stunts. Oh, yeah, I cracked this code a while back.
Here Neeson plays an (insert background merc job here) ex-demolitions expert who is framed for (insert horrible crime here) the murder of an FBI agent and also his (insert name of family member) girlfriend of one year is threatened, so he has to go to extreme lengths and great personal risk to expose the (insert corrupt government official) FBI agents who also stole the money from his bank heists. To say that these films are by-the-numbers is a bit of an understatement. BUT, he's great at playing the "nice guy who's been pushed too far by the system" role, he kind of built his whole post "Star Wars" career around that sort of thing. I'm guessing that I've got four more films that fit the same pattern coming up in the next few days.
But somebody really did a lot here with a little - bear in mind the cast list is only 26 people long, and one of those is a DOG, so really, 25. Filmed in and around Worcester, MA, and I could tell from the scenery this was Massachusetts, plus the bit players all had roles in either "The Holdovers" or "Equalizer 2", so that's a give-away, the use of local talent. And really the only interior filming locations were the FBI office, the hospital and Tom Dolan's hotel room, the rest was all exteriors and chase scenes.
What's really complicated here is the reason why Tom robs banks, I'm not really buying it because it has something to do with his mother dying while he was working as a demolitions guy in the army, then coming back and dealing with his father's grief, so he robbed banks because it was something to do that made him feel alive again, but he only robbed small banks that had abandoned properties next door over three-day weekends. And he never spent any of the money, he kept it all in storage. Yeah, this is all unnecessary and it doesn't make any sense, how about he robbed banks because "that's where the money is"? That would be a lot easier for me to believe.
And then he wants to turn himself in because he met a woman and fell in love? Give me a break, I mean I guess I can see going into a relationship with a clear conscience, and he'd want to avoid a situation later where he's got to go to jail for a long term and be apart from her, but by confessing he's got to go to jail anyway, so does this really logically follow? I'm not sure. If you had nine million dollars in a storage locker would you turn it in to the feds, or just buy a nice house and also maybe a chain of sandwich shops that would generate income?
If he were just worried about spending the money because it could be traced, that would make a bit more sense. But there probably could be ways to launder the money that wouldn't call attention to him, like using an off-shore bank or buying that chain of sandwich shops. Or donate it to charity and take the tax break? Or maybe just give it to the FBI without revealing his identity? There were better options, that's all I'm saying. I think he just really wanted to get his FBI code name changed, since they called him the In-and-Out-Bandit, which sounds really cheap and dirty.
Still, this was entertaining and action-packed and it was easy to root for the main character and his girlfriend to work it out. But that meant taking down the corrupt FBI agents, using that special set of skills he has. Then at the end they borrowed the pressure-sensitive car-seat bomb from "Retribution" - no, wait, that movie was made later so maybe THAT film borrowed the idea from THIS one.
Directed by Mark Williams (producer of "The Marksman" and "The Accountant")
Also starring Kate Walsh (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Jai Courtney (last seen in "Insurgent"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "When Trumpets Fade"), Anthony Ramos (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Jasmine Cephas Jones (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Devon Diep (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Herlin Areniello, James Milord (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Jose Guns Alves (ditto), Lewis D. Wheeler (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Michael Malvesti (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Osmani Rodriguez (ditto), Patty O'Neil (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Birol Tarkan Yildiz.
RATING: 7 out of 10 security cameras
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