‘Retribution’: Liam Neeson, action hero, will not slow down

A man is sitting on a bomb that has been planted in his car by a mysterious tormentor in the umpteenth thriller starring the AARP-eligible actor. With a metronomic regularity that didn’t even let up during the pandemic, Liam Neeson has continued to appear in one virtually interchangeable action thriller after another since reinventing himself as an action hero (in his 50s) with 2008’s “Taken.” In recent years, the 71-year-old Oscar nominee (“Schindler’s List”) has played a crotchety Arizona cattle rancher protecting a Mexican boy from a drug-cartel goon in “The Marksman,” an avenging grandpa/FBI operative in “Blacklight” and a hit man with Alzheimer’s disease in “Memory.”

In his newest film, “Retribution” — a remake of a 2015 Spanish film of the same name — Neeson plays Matt Turner, an American investment banker in Berlin. While chauffeuring his teenage son and daughter to school one day, Matt learns he is sitting on a bomb that will detonate if he stops the car, tries to get out or otherwise fails to obey the instructions of a mysterious stranger at the other end of his cellphone. These instructions include driving from one point to another, where Matt witnesses — and then is gradually implicated in — a string of car bombings that kill several of his co-workers. Noma Dumezweni plays the appealingly dogged, no-nonsense Europol detective who is hot on his trail.

So far, so familiar, at least in the broadest contours of a story about a man under … let’s just call it duress. (Matt’s wife is also considering divorcing him because he’s emotionally unavailable, and there are hints of possible financial chicanery.) Unlike many of Neeson’s characters, Matt doesn’t possess “a very particular set of skills” here, as the actor’s character in “Taken,” Bryan Mills, so euphemistically described his own lethality. Matt has a driver’s license and his wits. And maybe that’s enough.

This is the third collaboration between Neeson and producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman (they worked on “Non-Stop” in 2014 and “The Commuter” in 2018). Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed Neeson in those two films (as well as “Unknown” and “Run All Night”), here moves into the producer’s chair. Although there’s a certain cozy comfort to watching Neeson and his regular collaborators do their thing for the umpteenth time, a thing the actor has now been doing for 15 years, the whole operation feels more like a well-oiled machine — a cold commodity — than a warm blanket, or even a living thing. As Heineman put it in the film’s press material, “Over our time with Liam, we’ve got to crash a plane and derail a train. In ‘Retribution,’ we are blowing cars up all over Berlin.”