RETRIBUTION (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Retribution, Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 24, 2023

A man and his two children are trapped in a car rigged with a bomb. That's the simple and frightening premise of Retribution, a movie that clearly doesn't know what to do with its promising setup.

The movie is the third remake, following South Korean and German versions, of a 2015 Spanish movie. Since none of the previous iterations has had an official release in the United States, it's difficult to tell if the problems of this version are inherent to the material or unique to screenwriter Christopher Salmanpour and director Nimród Antal's adaptation. That's somewhat helpful, at least, because we can just treat this movie as its own entity, without any ability to offer or need for comparison. On the other hand, the lingering question of how this remake compares to the original or its subsequent adaptations might be more intriguing than most of what happens after a certain point in this story.

It follows Matt Turner, who's played by Liam Neeson in a role that might announce that, while filmmakers aren't finished with his most recent career shift toward becoming an action star, he might be. His character spends the majority of this plot planted to the driver's seat of a fancy SUV, and even though an introductory scene shows that Matt is competent as a fighter, he doesn't need those abilities at any point in the story.

That means we get to see Neeson give an actual performance without too many distractions for the first two acts of this tale, set in Berlin and relying on the tension of the pressure cooker of the setup. Matt is a banker or some financial guru with a particular set of skills—namely getting clients to invest in questionable deals devised by his fellow executives at the firm for which he works.

He's distracted on this particular morning, because his boss Anders (Matthew Modine) needs him to convince a skeptical client to put a lot of money into something or other. Matt barely notices that his wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz) has a busy day ahead herself, requiring her husband to drive their two children, teenaged Zach (Jack Champion) and younger Emily (Lilly Aspell), to school. He definitely doesn't notice that the news is reporting about a car bomb detonating in the city, killing a man who turns out to be one of Matt's colleagues.

Instead, Matt plops down in his car, unwittingly triggers a pressure plate that activates a bomb, and sets off with his kids in the backseat. When a random cellphone rings in the car, Matt answers, and the voice on the other end of the line informs him of the danger—that the bomb will explode if he or the kids get out of the car. Also, the bomber will remotely detonate the device if Matt doesn't follow the instructions provided to him.

What can be said of the actual plot—not because of any twists or surprises until, obviously, the big revelation, but because the above description is essentially all there is—is that it starts with Matt literally going in circles as he waits for something to happen. The whole screenplay essentially amounts to that, too, as the voice on the other end tells Matt to go to this place or the other, Matt does so and starts asking what he might have done to upset this person so much, and the voice offers vague statements and promises that Matt will figure out the truth sooner or later.

Antal and Salmanpour rely entirely on the presence of the bomb for suspense (They basically take that famous Alfred Hitchcock quote about a bomb under a table, transfer it to a car, and hope for the best). It's a fine enough idea, and Neeson sells the utter terror, the need to stay as calm as possible for the benefit of his children, and the rising indignation that someone would threaten him and his kids with a sense of conviction. The movie gives us a couple of other explosions, just so Matt and we know the bomber means business, but once it becomes clear that the plotting really isn't going anywhere until the action of the final act, it's difficult to find much intrigue or excitement in the circular dialogue about the roundabout mystery at the core of this story.

Once the action does start (with the cops suspecting Matt and giving us a notably lived-in, all-business performance by Noma Dumezweni as the cop in charge of the manhunt), it feels counterintuitive to everything Retribution has promised until that point. For whatever shortcomings the buildup might possess, a series of frantic, destructive chases and a completely nonsensical cheat of an answer are far from a satisfying payoff.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products