91 min | R | August 25, 2023 | Lionsgate
Liam Neeson is a wealthy financial executive driving his two kids to school. A voice on the phone tells him there is a bomb under the seats, and if anyone gets out, it detonates. The car keeps moving and the movie never does.
Matt Turner manages other people’s money in Berlin and neglects his own family doing it. One morning he drives his children to school and a stranger calls his phone. The caller claims a pressure-sensitive bomb sits under the seats. If Matt or the kids stand up, they die. Retribution is the third remake of the 2015 Spanish thriller El desconocido, and it builds its single idea on the premise that a man trapped in a car must confront what his greed has cost. The premise promises a moral reckoning. The film delivers a delivery system for set pieces.
Liam Neeson plays Matt Turner with the clenched-jaw fatigue that has defined his late-career action run. He spends most of the film seated, sweating, and barking into a phone, and he commits to the physical confinement. The role asks him to convey panic without leaving the driver’s seat, and he cannot find new colors in it. Lilly Aspell and Jack Champion play his children Emily and Zach as little more than screaming hostages. Noma Dumezweni plays investigator Angela Brickmann and Matthew Modine plays Matt’s colleague Anders Muller, but the script gives neither a character to inhabit.
Nimród Antal directs from a script by Chris Salmanpour, and the staging fights its own concept. The story confines its hero to a car, then cuts constantly to aerial drone shots of the vehicle weaving through Berlin traffic. Those overhead views relieve the claustrophobia the premise depends on. The bomb under the seat should make every interior shot unbearable. Instead the camera keeps escaping to the highway, and the tension leaks out with it.
Retribution wants to be a thriller about a man paying for his sins, but it forgets to make the sins matter. The plot reveals its villain through a mechanical twist that the construction telegraphs early. Every beat arrives on schedule because the formula demands it, and the formula never surprises. The pieces of a tense chamber thriller sit here, assembled by someone following the instructions without believing in them.