Review: Retribution

There are two ways to go with a high concept thriller. Either you stick with the concept right to the very end, or you try something new in act three and hope the audience doesn't mind. Speed is probably the best-known example of the latter, ditching the whole "there's a bomb on the bus" angle with twenty minutes to go. In Retribution, the bomb is in a car - though it turns out there's slightly more to the evil scheme than that.

Berlin-based Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is a typical Liam Neeson character, only pushed just that little bit further. We're used to seeing him play a gruff dad who's blunt nature hides a desire to do what's right for his family; here his family barely seems an afterthought. He's all about making money for his dodgy hedge fund and his pushy boss (Matthew Modine), and if he has to take the kids (Jack Champion and Lily Aspell) to school, they'd better not get in the way of his sleazy sales calls.

Then he gets a phone call telling him there's a bomb in his car. He triggered it when he sat down, and it he gets up, the car goes boom (much like another car did at the beginning of the film). If he lets the kids out, boom. If he calls the police, boom. You get the idea: he has to do what he's told if he wants to stay alive - even if what he's being told to do seems a little more personal than you'd expect. 

Being a Liam Neeson character, it doesn't take Turner long to a): start reconnecting with his kids, and b): start working on ways out of this situation. The film - a tight 90 minutes - is basically split into thirds: the first third sets the scene, the middle is a lot of driving around trying not to set off a bomb (other drivers around are not so fortunate) even as the police zero in on him, and the final third sees him turning the tables, though there's still a few twists to come.

Efficiency is an underrated virtue in thrillers, and while there's not a lot that's especially new here, director Nimrod Antal doesn't act like he's reinventing the wheel either. Expected plot points arrive early or are skimmed  past, while the action beats are well deployed and effective. The ride is still a little bumpy, but the basic emotional through-line - why is this happening to me, how can I keep my kids safe, how long before I can get revenge - is refreshingly solid for a B-movie.

Retribution also arrests a recent decline in Neeson's action adventures, returning to a level of solid competency after a run of films that often stumbled in one way or another. Perhaps responding to this, Neeson's performance is a notch above his action norm, making clear Turner's confusion, his fear for his kids, and his nagging sense that maybe he did do something to deserve all this. 

Also, in a development that shouldn't be surprising but actually is, it turns out the Berlin police are both competent and highly motivated to stop someone driving around like a madman with a bomb in his car. No doubt this was set in Europe for financial reasons, but having Turner up against a police department that won't just fire a couple thousand rounds into the car and call it a day definitely helps this run longer than your average Mercedes commercial.

- Anthony Morris