A bomb disposal thriller should usually be good for some cheesy entertainment. But this feels generic and unexcitingly acted, a by-the-numbers bit of work, remade from the 2015 Spanish movie El Desconocido, or The Stranger, starring Luis Tosar, which was itself borrowing heavily from such high-concept Hollywood jeopardy items as Speed and Phone Booth. And putting Liam Neeson in this new version is all too clearly designed to appeal to another customer fanbase, that of Neeson’s kidnap drama franchise Taken.
Neeson is in every sense phoning it in as Matt Turner, a financial trader in Berlin, living in a flashy house, working too hard, worried that clients are getting cross due to the risky investment advice he’s been giving lately and hardly realising his marriage is crumbling due to his neglect. One morning, after a sudden and unexpected request from his exasperated wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz), Matt takes his two kids to school in the back of the car, on the way to an important meeting. They are all baffled to hear an unfamiliar ringtone from a mobile phone placed by unseen hands just by the front passenger seat; a creepy distorted voice starts making demands and says that a pressure-switch bomb under Matt’s seat has been activated by him getting in the car. If he gets out, it blows up.
Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more. And the script itself tests your patience with implausibility and breezy claims about what services are freely available on the “dark web”. (Just once, I’d like to see any film, fact or fiction, show convincingly what can or cannot be procured on the “dark web”.) A whimper, here, not a bang.
• Retribution is released on 27 October in UK cinemas and on Sky Cinema and Now.
