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LIAM NEESON IS AT IT AGAIN IN ‘RETRIBUTION’

Acting careers cannot be charted or predicted; I’ve always thought that the best outcomes are a result of good choices and good luck in roughly equal measure. How the brooding Irish actor Liam Neeson wound up in globe-trotting action movies is one for the books…but that has become his specialty in the years since starring in Taken (2008). Fortunately, he has had ample opportunity to show us all that he has a robust sense of humor. But for now, it’s back to business. In Retribution he plays a successful but self-involved businessman who uses his wits—and sheer guts—to outsmart an unknown assailant who has planted a bomb in his car, which he drives around Berlin, with his two children trapped in the back seat.

If that premise seems laughable to you, stop reading now. If you aren’t willing to suspend your disbelief to that extent you’ll never make it through this well-paced yarn. The best adjective I can think of to describe this film is “efficient.” It gets the job done, much as one would expect.

My only disappointment is that its director, Nimród Antal, launched his career with a sensational sleeper called Control (2003) that I have never forgotten. I’m happy to know that he is gainfully employed (he even directed two episodes of Stranger Things last year) but I yearn to see something as original and provocative as his calling-card feature.

Leonard Maltin is one of the world’s most respected film critics and historians. He is best known for his widely-used reference work Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and its companion volume Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, now in its third edition, as well as his thirty-year run on television’s Entertainment Tonight. He teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and appears regularly on Reelz Channel and Turner Classic Movies. His books include The 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, The Great Movie Comedians, The Disney Films, The Art of the Cinematographer, Movie Comedy Teams, The Great American Broadcast, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia. He served two terms as President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, is a voting member of the National Film Registry, and was appointed by the Librarian of Congress to sit on the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation. He hosted and co-produced the popular Walt Disney Treasures DVD series and has appeared on innumerable television programs and documentaries. He has been the recipient of awards from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Telluride Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and San Diego’s Comic-Con International. Perhaps the pinnacle of his career was his appearance in a now-classic episode of South Park. (Or was it Carmela consulting his Movie Guide on an episode of The Sopranos?) He holds court at leonardmaltin.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook; you can also listen to him on his weekly podcast: Maltin on Movies. — [Artwork by Drew Friedman]

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