Ever since the surprise worldwide success of "Taken" back in 2008, Liam Neeson has developed a surprisingly secondary career as a badass action hero, generally playing some variation of a guy with a certain set of skills who proceeds to deploy them on any bad guys unfortunate enough to cross his path, especially if they do anything to mess with his family. Now 72, he has been giving interviews suggesting that his days as this generation's Charles Bronson may be coming to an end (though perhaps not too quickly if the IMDb listing of his upcoming projects is any indication), and after watching his latest foray into the action genre, Absolution, it is unlikely that too many people will be put out by this decision. The film isn't necessarily terrible, but it proves to be deeply unmemorable by offering viewers little more than a rehash of things they have presumably seen before and then taking an unconscionable amount of time to do so.
Neeson plays a character who is identified in the credits only as Thug, a one-time boxer who now spends his days working as an enforcer in the employ of local gangster Charlie Conner (Ron Perlman) and his wannabe-tough-guy son Kyle (Daniel Diemer) and his nights living alone in his blue-collar Boston neighborhood. However, that seems to be in the process of changing early on when he meets someone only referred to as Woman (Yolanda Ross) after decking her abusive boyfriend one night in a bar. After suffering several troubling mental lapses, he goes to see a doctor and is given a diagnosis of an advanced case of CTE and has maybe two years at the most before he will no longer be able to care for himself.
After a halfhearted attempt to commit suicide, he decides to try to use his remaining time to try to make amends for the mistakes in his life. (You saw the title.) Primarily, he wants to reconnect with the two grown children he essentially abandoned. Still, when he goes to visit his daughter, Daisy (Frankie Shaw), she informs him that she wants nothing to do with him, that a reunion with his son is not in the cards, and that she is about to lose the home that she shares with her two kids. Meanwhile, while doing a drop-off for his boss, he becomes aware of a human trafficking operation and tries to figure out a way of saving one of the victims (Deanna Tarraza). If that weren't enough, a botched attempt on his life during another job suggests that someone out there is trying to do him in. Amazingly, nearly every one of the plot points that I have cited is resolved over the course of the long and increasingly violent night that makes up the film's final section.
If most of this sounds kind of familiar to you, it's because Tony Gatyon's screenplay often feels like all of Neeson's action films jammed together—even the notion of him playing a tough guy dealing with a serious cognitive disorder was already explored in "Memory" (2022)—to the point where it comes across like the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album. To be fair, the film does dial down on the on-screen for the most part for the first half, preferring to concentrate on scenes involving his tentative relationship with the Woman, his daughter, and the grandson (Terrence Pulliam) that he has never known as well as hallucinations involving his late father, whose pattern of neglect was clearly passed on to him. Although some of the scenes between Thug and his grandson are kind of cute, they don't bring anything new to the table, and those lured in by the action-heavy trailer are likely to grow very restless. Some of the other touches, on the other hand, such as the conceit of not giving two of the key characters proper names or the dream sequences involving his father, do not work at all and only end up hinting at lofty artistic ambitions that the film never quite figures out how to embrace.
"Absolution" was directed by Hans Petter Moland, who previously collaborated with Neeson on one of the very best of his action programmers, the clever and amusing "Cold Pursuit" (2019). This one is not nearly as good as that one—the sentimentality on display here is no match for the dark humor of the earlier team-up—but it has been made with a certain degree of skill and does not have the late-period Cannon Films-fodder feel of such duds as "The Marksman" (2021), "Blacklight" (2022), "Retribution" (2023) and other films that you have probably forgotten even existed, though, at nearly two hours, it does drag on a bit too long for a film that is relatively slim in terms of its narrative.
As for Neeson, he still looks like someone perfectly capable of kicking ass and lends an undeniable gravitas to even the most hackneyed moments, but even so, watching him go through his paces here is like watching a grand pianist playing "Chopsticks" for 112 minutes—he does what he does well enough but all involved (including him) know that he is capable of doing better and more challenging work.
Perhaps if Neeson had only occasionally dabbled in the action genre over the last decade or so, then "Absolution" might have come across as a noble but uneven attempt to fuse standard action beats with a more grounded human story. As it is, the film is more of an overlong and dramatically undernourished work that tries for a little bit to be more than just a run-of-the-mill Neeson action extravaganza before eventually becoming just that. As someone who has actually seen the lion's share of those films, I can tell you that this is probably one of the better examples of that most curious of sub-genres. However, that ultimately says more about the genuinely dire nature of many of Neeson's shoot-em-ups over the years than it does about the intrinsic qualities of this one.
