99 min | PG-13 | October 16, 2020 | Open Road Films
A retired bank robber decides to come clean for the woman he loves. The FBI agents he confesses to would rather keep the money than close the case. Liam Neeson punches his way through another one of these, and the autopilot is showing.
Tom Dolan robs banks for a living and never gets caught. He falls for Annie Wilkins and decides the only way forward is to confess every crime and serve his time. He calls the FBI to surrender the stolen money in exchange for a lighter sentence. The agents assigned to verify his claim choose to steal the cash and frame him instead. This is a film about a man who tries to do the right thing and learns the institutions he trusts are more corrupt than he ever was.
Liam Neeson plays Tom with weariness rather than menace. He wants the violence to be over and the film lets him slow down before the script forces him to speed back up. Kate Walsh plays Annie as a grounded counterweight, though the romance gets shoved aside the moment the plot needs gunfire. Jai Courtney plays Agent Nivens as a smug opportunist who escalates from greed to murder without much hesitation. Jeffrey Donovan plays Agent Meyers with dry humor and a small dog that does more for the character than the dialogue does.
Mark Williams directs from a script he co-writes with Steve Allrich, and the seams show in both jobs. The Boston exteriors are shot flat and gray, and the action stays close and functional instead of kinetic. Williams stages the centerpiece chase and the climactic confrontation with competence and no signature. The editing cuts away from consequence too quickly, so the murders that should anchor the stakes land with no weight. Robert Patrick turns up as the steady supervisor Baker and gives the procedural scenes the only authority they have.
The premise has a real idea inside it. A criminal confesses and the badges turn out to be the thieves. The film states that irony in the opening act and then abandons it for car chases and fistfights it has staged a hundred times before. Neeson is watchable because he is always watchable. The movie around him settles for being a delivery system and never reaches for the better story it briefly held.