108 min | PG-13 | January 15, 2021 | Open Road Films
A retired Arizona rancher and Marine sniper finds a Mexican boy and his mother at his fence line, running from a cartel. He buries the mother and drives the kid north toward Chicago with killers on his bumper. Liam Neeson has made this drive before, and the road is getting familiar.
Jim Hanson works a failing cattle ranch on the Arizona border. The bank is taking his land. His wife is dead and his stepdaughter is a Border Patrol agent. One morning a woman and her young son scramble across his property with cartel gunmen behind them. The woman dies and Hanson takes the boy, Miguel, and points his truck toward family in Chicago. The Marksman is a road movie about a hard old man and a frightened kid, and it is built entirely from parts you have seen before.
Liam Neeson plays Hanson as a man worn down to bone and grievance. He underplays the action and leans into the fatigue, which is the right instinct for a character who is broke, widowed, and out of options. Jacob Perez plays Miguel with wary silence that slowly cracks, and the scenes where the two share food or a motel room carry more weight than the gunfights. Juan Pablo Raba plays the cartel enforcer Mauricio with cold patience but the script gives him nothing beyond function. Katheryn Winnick plays the stepdaughter Sarah and exists mainly to deliver exposition over the phone. Teresa Ruiz appears as Rosa for one scene before the plot disposes of her.
Robert Lorenz directs from a script he wrote with Chris Charles and Danny Kravitz. Lorenz spent years as Clint Eastwood’s assistant director and producer, and the influence is on every frame. The film moves at an unhurried, almost elegiac pace, with cinematography that lingers on dust, desert highways, and the lined geography of Neeson’s face. The problem is that Lorenz mistakes slowness for gravity. The chase never escalates, the villains never become a real threat, and the score swells on cue to tell you what to feel when the images cannot.
The Marksman wants to be a melancholy character study wearing the clothes of a thriller. It has the patience for the first and none of the conviction for the second. Neeson commits fully to a man at the end of his usefulness, and Perez gives him something real to play against. The film around them is a checklist. Border crisis, dead parent, reluctant guardian, cartel pursuit, redemption at the destination. Lorenz assembles these pieces with care and never once surprises you with where they go.