Retribution

 This review may contain spoilers!

 

Retribution follows a stock broker who finds himself trapped in his car with his children upon discovering a bomb strapped underneath his seat. He must follow the instructions of a mysterious individual in order to rescue himself and his family. This film is really good at hooking the audience back in at the turn of the act. When first Matt Turner starts talking with the bomber you get a big tonal shift, the action is heightened when a young vulnerable character becomes injured and there is a momentary air of mystery in one scene that leaves us really questioning the protagonist. I liked these staples of the thriller genre really being hit because these are the points that come alive and really make you sit up and pay attention as an audience member.

The feature also boasts some pretty sharp editing that really tidies up the poor story pacing and bland visual style in places.

 

Lilly Aspell, who played Emily Turner, is quite a present performance with a strong sense of delivery; Aspell gives a bit of a spark to her role that marks her as an extremely talented young performer.

However, the best performance came from Liam Neeson, who played Matt Turner. Neeson is a career leading actor who has taken progressively smaller scale projects with a pretty steady drive to see them through. I'm impressed with just how much he carries this feature, in my opinion if you're not here to watch Neeson then you're not really here for anything at all. When we first meet Matt Turner he is very scatter-brained, stressed and distracted; a figure who is lacking both as a husband and a parent. Neeson does some great early work butting heads with his on-screen children to show the very fragile sense of authority and discipline Matt has in his household. I thought Neeson showed a different side of himself by portraying this sleazy charismatic salesman type, a man who can really lie to his clients with an easy manner and a false looking smile. Yet as the film went along what really sets this role apart is how Neeson portrays a man terrified, with no real sense of control having the worst day of his life. It's down to him to sell the predicament and he does it very well. The way this character begins to bubble over with rage near the end of the second act really signals a shift of tone that works well for the conflict. Neeson's experience results in a great leading performance that stands out in an otherwise unremarkable feature.

This film feels like a B grade thriller almost from the go with the very thin allusions to the bomb threat to come. Retribution suffers from a lack of characters the audience can like; many of the main roles seem like genuinely awful people; our protagonist is unironically proclaimed as a 'champion of capitalism' in his first scene which doesn't really endear him to many. The characters all squabble and fight and display few moments of redemptive behaviour, Matt Turner's entire family dynamic gets quite toxic at multiple stages. Yet the film just sort of patches these divides because the family all suffers the same harrowing experience together; you don't exactly feel like any of our leading roles go through great changes as people. The fact our main character is a stock broker fighting an antagonist over millions of dollars that they both have access to is another reason this film becomes hard to relate to as a viewer. It's a world of greed, but not one we know nor one the feature really seems interested in introducing us to so that we can understand and relate to the situation more. The fact the main protagonist gets away from the antagonist for a whole significant section really undercuts the stakes the film had otherwise established and the final confrontation between these two is laughable at times. Retribution fails to be a surprising beast, the antagonist isn't really a surprise and even someone paying fleeting notice would see the 'twist' coming from a mile off. This is a film meant to thrill but it doesn't do that enough, nor does it allow us to even care about the plot or characters on display.

 

The way Retribution is shot really highlights how the concept can be very limiting to film to the uninspired eye; I found the array of cinematography to be repetitive and bleakly grey. The score for the film was a simple affair that toned along whimsically but felt pitched to the low stakes thriller this was.

 

Noma Dumezweni, who played Angela Brickmann, is having a tough run of roles so far this year; Dumezweni gives a dry performance that results in a pretty stereotypical portrayal of a law enforcement officer. Jack Champion, who played Zach Turner, is one of my least favourite up and comers in the business right now; Champion really doesn't know how to bring depth to a role and struggles to do anything new with the rebellious teenager shtick here. Embeth Davidtz, who played Heather Turner, feels like she doesn't know how to portray anything bar impassive the whole film; I can understand Davidtz having no chemistry with Neeson but the fact she doesn't even hold anything with the rest of her onscreen family is a shame. Matthew Modine, who played Anders Muller, is entirely unconvincing as a long time friend to Neeson in this feature; Modine really just exceeds himself by hamming it up in the final act as an over the top antagonist with extremely thin motives.

Liam Neeson has starred in a few poor B grade action/thrillers in recent years, but this might just be the worst one yet. I would give Retribution a 3/10.