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‘Absolution’ Review: The Liam Neeson Action Revenge Genre Winds Down as He Plays an Enforcer with Memory Issues
The actor gives a mournful performance (and still, of course, kicks ass) in a movie with a canny underworld atmosphere and too many familiar devices.
He lives in a spacious beat-up home rental in Winthrop, Mass., across the harbor from Boston’s Logan Airport, and he seems completely alone there (even the TV set doesn’t work), pouring out another bourbon to get through the afternoon. He’s suffering from memory loss as a result of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the condition that used to be called “punch-drunk,” and Neeson, face sunken with despair, makes you feel the suppressed anxiety with which he scrawls names in notebooks to remember them. But “Absolution” wants so much to be a real movie — almost like one of Clint Eastwood’s elegies for his own legend — that it only makes you that much more aware that it’s an awkward pedestal for a great actor trying to turn slumming into art.
Or read this on Variety