The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
Some people mark the passage of time by the changing of the seasons; from the first chill on an Autumn night that warns of the coming winter to the first sunny afternoon in Spring that brings promise of the long, hot days ahead. I instead mark the passage of time with lame-ass Liam Neeson action movies. It’s been three months since Honest Thief, so, like clockwork, it’s time to unwrap this latest package of meh and try to think of something that I haven’t already said about Neeson’s last dozen movies.
Neeson stars as Jim, a broke ex-marine that is still mourning the loss of his wife to cancer. The early stages of the film, as we see Jim lose his ranch to foreclosure and start to crawl into a whisky bottle, are surprisingly strong and heartfelt. Neeson’s performance is endearing and one really starts to feel for this guy. But then the script remembers that it’s a shitty action movie and we take an abrupt turn into boring nonsense with no hope of returning.
Neeson stumbles upon a Mexican mother and son illegally crossing the border to try to escape a cartel and, after a shootout, Neeson takes the kid to an immigration detention center. The next day, he realizes that the cartel is waiting on the other side of the border to kill the boy and the kid’s only hope is to be taken to his family in Chicago. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Neeson’s step daughter, who he is very close with, is in charge of the detention center. Given that, would you simply tell her what’s happening? Or would you do something completely fucking asinine like kidnap the kid from the detention center and drive him across country yourself? Right, so he kidnaps the kid and they hit the road. The cartel is in hot pursuit, but unfortunately for them, Neeson has a very particular set of skills that….look, I know you’re tired of me making that Taken reference. I’m tired of writing that Taken reference. But these fucking movies aren’t giving me much to work with.
Anyway, much like News of the World, the film is then a road trip movie about a man trying to transport a traumatized kid to their estranged family, which is an oddly specific theme for the month of January. Also like News of the World, this is pretty damn boring. For starters, there is very little action in this action movie. There is a shootout in the beginning, a shootout at the end and a whole lot of fuck-all in the middle. The cartel kills a couple of people, sure, but it is all off-camera because the PG-13 rating doesn’t really allow one to show the brutality of the drug trade. Come to think of it, I don’t even understand the title. Neeson makes a couple of good shots, sure, but nothing that any marine probably couldn’t do and the movie makes no mention of him being a sniper or anything. This thing couldn’t muster up the energy to incorporate its own frigging title.
While News of the World utilized the more traditional, episodic structure of a road trip movie, The Marksman shakes this up by instead just doing the same fucking thing over and over again. Neeson uses his credit card somewhere, the cartel is able to track his location this way, they go to that location and kill somebody, Neeson uses his credit card again, rinse and repeat. I spent the middle portion of this film envisioning the screenwriter trying to figure out how many times he had to repeat this pattern in order to get the film to feature length. Couple of odd things about it, though. First, the police can’t figure out how to track him this way, but the cartel can. Second, for a guy that refuses to own a cell phone, its odd that Neeson wouldn’t think to stop using his fucking credit card for every purchase while he is a fugitive from the law and being hunted down by drug dealers. That’s some street smarts, right there. He does keep managing to get to a pay phone to call the authorities to promise that he’ll bring the kid back so that they don’t chase him down. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
If you are bored one night and catch this on tv, you probably won’t be particularly upset and you will forget about it the next morning. But I just can’t get past the overwhelming blah-ness of it. The Marksman is like Sicario without the grim realism or Rambo: Last Blood without the cartoonish violence; it’s just a whole lot of not much.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marksman_(2021_film)#/media/File:TheMarksmanPoster.jpeg
