BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over from "Marlowe", for the last time in this chain, but he's on top of the leader board for 2025 right now, with nine appearances. Well, everything has to end sometime, I think today just proves that little maxim, in more ways than one.
THE PLOT: An assassin-for-hire finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization.
AFTER: This is kind of a repeat theme, because I just watched Liam Neeson play a very similar character, a hit-man for hire, in the St. Patrick's Day film two days ago, "In the Land of Saints and Sinners". Sure, that film was set in Ireland in 1974, and this one's set in Texas & Mexico during modern times, but come on, essentially the same film in many ways. Beyond the job there's the fact that Neeson's character is very protective of children in both films, and also he's an expert in firearms and demolitions, that's pretty standard for an action hero with a shady past, which is apparently the type of character he likes to play. But also he faces off with the FBI here, and that hearkens back to "Honest Thief" and "Blacklight" - so really, a lot of repeating themes this week, or perhaps each film is just a re-shuffling of the same game pieces.
But the twist here is that Neeson's character, Alex Lewis, has Alzheimer's/dementia, he takes medication for it and tries to stop the onset of the disease, but it's still going to kick in at some point. Early in the film he visits his older brother who's already living in a nursing home for the same reason, and he can't carry on a conversation or even recognize Alex. So, really, it would be a great time for Alex Lewis to retire, only he's still taking contract killing jobs, and you get the feeling this isn't going to end well for him.
Meanwhile, there's a parallel story with the FBI Child Exploitation Task Force, we see them undercover, taking down a man in Texas who's pimping out his young daughter. During the operation, Agent Serra's cover is blown, and he pushes the suspect out a window, which leads to a death rather than an arrest. The teen girl, Beatriz, is taken to a detention center, but Agent Serra works to get her released to a group home, which is a better environment for her. But when hit-man Lewis is contracted to kill two people, one of whom is this same teen girl, then the parallel stories are bound to meet. The FBI's efforts to control sex trafficking keep getting thwarted, and the best theory is that the mystery woman who's always seen being examined by the anti-aging doctor is also the woman hiring the hit-man, but what one thing has to do with the other is really very unclear.
Alex turns out to have some kind of a conscience - he'll kill the first target, an adult man who's a builder of the processing facility that holds the immigrants and young sex workers, but he won't kill Beatriz because of her young age. Alex even tracks down the contact who offered him the two jobs and roughs the guy up to drive home the point that he won't be completing the second part of the hit. But later Alex has vivid dreams about shooting the girl, so is it possible that he DID do it, and doesn't remember doing it? Nah, they probably just hired another hitman, but still, he had a dream about it. So, yeah, that's also unclear.
With Guy Pearce having a prominent role here, it's a clear sign they wanted this to be like "Memento" but it's just not. That film had a character who could not make new memories, but he had access to his long-term memories. We're dealing with the reverse here, Alex can carry out a hit (provided he brings a photo of the target) but he can't remember what happened yesterday, or where he hid an important piece of evidence. But at one point he takes to writing important information down on his arms, and there's the reference to "Memento".
Alex hides out in an abandoned bakery that once belonged to his family, and he finds that the flash drive that he took from the safe of the man he killed contains a phone call of the woman who ordered the hit, and also footage of her son, Randy, committing sexual assault. Before he goes on the run, Randy throws one last sex party on his yacht, but Alex got there first and was waiting for him in the closet off the bedroom. Sorry, Randy. Meanwhile the FBI are working hard to put all the pieces together, they've got bodies piling up and they all seem to be people connected to that immigration detention facility, what does that mean? Who is going around El Paso killing the builder and owner of that detention center, and also one of its former inmates? They take so long figuring it out that Alex actually has to call them and clue them in about who's ordering the hits. It's kind of sad when even the FBI needs help figuring stuff out.
The whole last half-hour here is just clean-up, all rather unnecessary but the storyline needed to take some extreme steps to make sure that the bad people died and the good people lived. OK, well, most of them anyway. It's all very basic, though, it doesn't really feel like any new territory was covered here.
Directed by Martin Campbell (director of "The Protégé")
Also starring Guy Pearce (last seen in "The Rover"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Harold Torres, Taj Atwal (last seen in "The Protégé"), Ray Fearon (last seen in "Barbie"), Daniel de Bourg, Josh Taylor, Ray Stevenson (last seen in "Allegiant"), Mia Sanchez, Lee Boardman (last seen in "Enola Holmes 2"), Scot Williams, Rebecca Calder (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Stella Stocker (also carrying over from "Marlowe"), Natalie Anderson, Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Antonio Jaramillo (last seen in "Savages"), Doug Rao (last seen in "Colombiana"), Josh Macrena, J.R. Esposito (last seen in "Barbarian"), Devina Vassileva (ditto), Vladimir Mihaylov (last seen in "The Expend4bles"), Sofia Soltess, Tudor Chirila (also last seen in "The Protégé"), Mariana Krumova, Lubomir Bachvarov, Sigal Diamant (last seen in "The Musketeer"), Danay Velinova, Louis Mandylor (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Neda Spasova, Kalina Stancheva, Rosen Kovachev, with a cameo from Jake Tapper (last seen in "Glass Onion")
RATING: 5 out of 10 bruises seen in Alex's childhood photos
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