The Marksman (2021) We'd rather not spend a lot of time and verbiage deriding such a slight, uninteresting generic movie......
Liam Neeson's always been among our faves and we even stuck with him when he said farewell to major A-list projects and surrendered his career to a string of lower level action movies......all of which feature more or less the same plot.......
The basic premise - Aging, weary Liam, seemingly a mild-mannered, ordinary working stiff and all around nice guy, finds himself pitted against a veritable army of vicious thugs. The thugs always , always underestimate Liam.....fatally.
Guess who comes out on top at the end?
When these movies, for all their obvious characteristics, were action-packed and fun, we watched and enjoyed them as much as everybody else did. Nobody cared that they were junk.....as long as we got to revel at the sight of Neeson, working way, way below his abilities, takin' names and kickin' ass.
But would we rather want to see him back in a great role in a genuine quality film? Of course, but if Liam just wanted to collect the paychecks,(like Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage), we'd go along for ride.
Somewhere along the line, the people who slap together these movies began to take themselves seriously......thinking they could attempt to make a Liam shoot-em-up, punch-em-up look like high art.....and maybe give Liam a role to re-establish his 'real actor' credentials.
The sorry results of this misguided mission - "The Marksman", a slow, dreary, depressing slog from beginning to end. And a dull ordeal to sit through, right up to its downbeat ending.....(which its writer and director no doubt thought was the epitome of award worthy gravitas.....)
Unlike other Neeson quick-paycheck vehicles, there's no fun to be had here at all......this time he's a beaten down Vietnam vet Arizona cattle rancher, overwhelmed with grief over the death of his cancer-stricken wife and facing bank foreclosure on his home and ranch. He routinely calls in the Border patrol to scoop up illegal immigrants he spots on his land, with little thought to the strife and misery that led them to their desperate journeys to cross into the U.S.
All that changes when he ends up on protecting a fleeing young Mexican boy whose family ran afoul of the Cartel. Hot on their heels, as Neeson and the boy embark on cross country trek to untie the kid with Chicago relatives, comes a carload of heavily armed Cartel goons.
Instead of an urgently suspenseful treatment that you might believe such a story requires, the filmmakers opt for a snail-paced, self reflective drama, only briefly interrupted from time to time by sudden spurts of violence.
It's the kind of stillborn, autumnal seriousness we managed to tolerate in Clint Eastwood's "Cry Macho "since Eastwood's given a much deeper backstory. (see our post of ) But "The Marksman" , when you get right down to it, with its paint-by-numbers plotting has little on its mind except Neeson eliminating enough Cartel goons to save the day.
And if the movie's not going to let us get our guilty pleasure jollies watching Liam go medieval on villains' asses, then why watch it at all?
We're sorry we did. 1 star (*). Skip it.
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