104 min | PG-13 | February 11, 2022 | Open Road Films
Liam Neeson plays a government fixer who cleans up the FBI’s messes and starts to suspect his own agency is the mess. A reporter, a whistleblower, and a deep-state conspiracy stand between him and retirement. The plot has all the parts and none of the pulse.
Travis Block is a fixer for the FBI. He extracts undercover agents who get burned and disappears the agency’s problems before they reach daylight. He is also a grandfather with obsessive compulsive routines who wants out. When an agent named Dusty Crane goes rogue with evidence of a domestic assassination program, Block starts asking the questions a fixer is paid not to ask. The film wants to be a paranoid conspiracy thriller about the security state turning its guns inward, but it never commits to the paranoia or the politics.
Liam Neeson plays Block with the same weary growl he has deployed in a dozen of these. He hits his marks and throws his punches and conveys nothing underneath the fatigue. Emmy Raver-Lampman plays the journalist Mira Jones as a collection of reporter clichés, chasing a story the script refuses to make dangerous. Taylor John Smith plays Dusty Crane with a nervous energy that suggests a better movie happening offscreen. Aidan Quinn plays FBI director Gabriel Robinson as a villain whose menace arrives entirely through dialogue, because the staging gives him nothing to do.
Mark Williams directs from a script he wrote with Nick May, and the seams show in every transition. The action scenes cut so frequently that geography dissolves into noise. A parking garage chase and a late foot pursuit both rely on the editing to hide that the choreography has no weight. The score swells on cue to tell the audience when to feel tension the images fail to generate. The Canberra locations stand in for Washington without conviction, and the production design never builds a world that feels lived in or surveilled.
The film gestures at real anxieties about an intelligence apparatus that murders American citizens and calls it security. Then it backs away from every implication and resolves the conspiracy with a press conference and a gunfight. Block’s arc asks whether a man who has spent his life cleaning up atrocities can wash his own hands. The movie poses the question and then forgets it was asked.