If a certain star keeps returning to a certain will over and over again, critics and audiences are bound to lose interest eventually. That happened a long time ago with Liam Neeson and his signature brand of action thriller histrionics, but he keeps on knocking ’em out anyway, with Retribution the latest to fall flat.
The honeymoon period is most definitely over after the leading man’s latest hard-boiled genre film crawled to a 29 percent approval rating and failed to even reach its $20 million budget in ticket sales at the box office, and it’s been a very long time since he starred in a runner, gunner, or shooter that everybody agreed was above average.
In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to 2014’s Non-Stop to find the last time Neeson took top billing in a thriller that critics and crowds both scored above 60 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In between those two points, though, he’s lent his name to no less than 12 of them, so maybe he should make good on his promise to retire from the game.
Then again, with FlixPatrol revealing Retribution as one of the Top 10 most-watched features among iTunes users in the United States, folks are still willing to see what sort of hijinks he gets himself caught up in, which in this case sees Neeson trapped in a car with his family and trying to save them from the threat of an explosive device poised to detonate if they even think about getting out of the vehicle.