The Liam Neeson Action Genre Starts to Wind Down

Liam Neeson recently said that he’s planning to retire from the action revenge genre that injected his career with a second life, starting with “Taken” back in 2008. Neeson was 55 when he shot that movie — old enough to play a hardened former CIA operative, ageless enough that we believed in his strength and speed and badass vigor. In the 16 years since, the Liam Neeson vigilante B-movie with attitude became its own genre. I’m one of many who look forward to these films and enjoy, in theory, their no-frills sadistic mayhem. But the truth is that Neeson, with his towering presence and sinewy resolve, is always better than the movies themselves.

In memory, most of them blur together, and it’s amazing how much they all still feel powered by that speech in “Taken” (“I can tell you I don’t have any money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you…”). It’s Liam Neeson, in fact, who has a very particular set of skills. Playing lone-wolf Bronson and Bruce Willis knockoffs, he radiates such a dark intelligence ­— very Bond-like — that you take in each moment through his clenched precision.

But “Absolution,” his latest lean-and-mean production, isn’t like the others. It’s a movie that seems to know that it’s coming to the end of the Neeson pulp programmer road. He plays a gangster’s enforcer who is never named, which feels right, since for all his brutal efficiency he’s just a rusty cog in the Boston underworld machine. He lives in a spacious beat-up home rental in Winthrop, Mass., across the harbor from Boston’s Logan Airport, and he seems completely alone there (even the TV set doesn’t work), pouring out another bourbon to get through the afternoon.

Neeson, even as he’s aged, usually looks killer. In “Absolution,” though, he’s outfitted like a ruffian gone to seed. He lopes around in an ancient long brown leather coat, and his scraggly white-gray sideburns and mustache look like they’ve been hanging out on his face since the ’70s. The look reminded me of the late great sportswriter Frank Deford, but Neeson is playing a thug who is shambling and out-of-it, who has never changed and now finds himself running on empty.

The character started off as a boxer and has become a bum, like Brando’s Terry Malloy. He’s suffering from memory loss as a result of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the condition that used to be called “punch-drunk,” and Neeson, face sunken with despair, makes you feel the suppressed anxiety with which he scrawls names in notebooks to remember them. The film is reminiscent, at moments, of “Knox Goes Away,” in which Michael Keaton played a hitman with dementia, but that movie (which Keaton directed, and beautifully) was far craftier than this one.

“Absolution” marks the second time that Neeson has collaborated with the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland (they made “Cold Pursuit” in 2019), and Moland has a gift for setting and atmosphere. He knows how to exploit that whole second-tier Boston thing — that it’s the underworld that’s off to the side of New York, less showy and more prosaic in terms of how crime works. Neeson’s boss, played by Ron Perlman as an avuncular-but-really-affectless gangster, depends on him for a host of jobs, but Neeson now has to partner with Perlman’s son (Daniel Diemer), a hothead with a shit-eating grin who acts out his entitlement by getting into trouble. Neeson, by contrast, is the quiet professional, with a right hook that can still jab like a crowbar.

The movie sets the stage nicely, and Neeson doesn‘t make a false move. “Absolution” wants to be more than a dumb action film. Neeson takes you part of the way there, but in its atmospheric way the movie is cobbled together out of so many standard but disparate devices that it can feel as pumped-up as the cliché thriller it’s trying not to be.

Neeson’s lonely old violent henchman drinks cheap booze on the rocks around the clock. He falls into a fling with an effervescent barfly (nicely played by Yolonda Ross). He tries to reconnect with his adult daughter (Frankie Shaw), a sex worker who hates him for abandoning her. He tries to connect with his grandchildren — which means taking his mixed-race middle-school grandson to the gym to get him into boxing. He’s tasked with driving a mysterious truck back from New York, and when it turns out to be full of trafficked women, he decides to “save” one of them in the searing-Calvinist-guilt mode of “Taxi Driver” and “Hardcore.” Then he has a run-in with mysterious assassins. Did I mention that his other adult child died of a heroin overdose…and was gay?

There are dream sequences (the first one is good; they should have left it at that), along with some well-staged suspense bits, like the sequence of Neeson driving that truck back from New York. There’s a powerful scene in a ritzy restaurant, where his class anger comes pouring out. But “Absolution” wants so much to be a real movie — almost like one of Clint Eastwood’s elegies for his own legend — that it only makes you that much more aware that it’s an awkward pedestal for a great actor trying to turn slumming into art.