Directed By Martin Campbell

Starring – Liam Neeson, Guy Pierce, Monica Bellucci

The Plot – Alex Lewis (Neeson) is an expert assassin with a reputation for discreet precision. Caught in a moral quagmire, Alex refuses to complete a job that violates his code and must quickly hunt down and kill the people who hired him before they and FBI agent Vincent Serra (Pearce) find him first. Alex is built for revenge but, with a memory that is beginning to falter, he is forced to question his every action, blurring the line between right and wrong.

Rated R for violence, some bloody images and adult language throughout

Memory | Official Trailer | Only In Theatres April 29 – YouTube

POSITIVES

Pierce’s back must be sore after carrying the film with a commitment to performance that not only requires him to capably pick up the slack for his mostly underwhelming ensemble, but also certifies him as the ideal protagonist needed to sift through the movie’s murky waters of sagging creativity. Because of such, he’s the only one who feels like he isn’t phoning his performance in, instead attacking Vincent with a combination of ruthless intensity and internal longing that help to flesh out the three-dimensional motivations of the character, all the while articulating Pierce’s impeccable range as one of the most underrated performers of our respective generation. Beyond Guy, Briarcliff Productions is also looking to make the most of the opportunity, this time harvesting ambition within the presentation that begins with geographical consciousness in the establishing cinematography from David Tattersall, before continuing with the alluring sleekness of the movie’s complimentary style producing an unforeseen quality of science fiction familiarity to contradict perception of what an action thriller is supposed to look like. It elicits a big screen captivity for Briarcliff that serves as a result of the production’s 42-million-dollar budget, and helps them to obscure the conveyance of cheapness, which has condemned their previous films immediately upon arrival.

NEGATIVES

Martin Campbell, where did it all go wrong? I ask this because Campbell is the same man who commanded two of the best James Bond films of all time in “Goldeneye” and “Casino Royale”, yet here feels as sedated as a coma patient. His flatly hollow direction exudes a difficulty not only in the coherence of the storytelling, which often leans heavily on the heavy-handed exposition for audience interpretation, but also undercuts the movie’s few action sequences with an absence of emphasis. This requires the editing to work overtime in illustrating a 69-year-old Neeson to be this unrelenting badass, but instead trips up the execution with a lack of continuity that disjoints depiction in the most visually alienating manner imaginable. On top of this, the flatness of the direction requires exhilaration, but instead conjures ambiguity, resulting in several sequences of physicality to elicit unintentional laughs from my engagement, absolving the film of the kind of urgency and anxiousness needed to earn itself compelling drama. This certainly makes the pacing an arduous task full of repetition and sedation in the construct of its sequencing, but the problem is even bigger than that, in that the script isn’t flashy or compelling enough to maintain attention through the entirety of its 108-minute distance, leaving it with several moments of pocketed boredom that directly undersell the conflict and saturate any momentary momentum it picks up along the way. Beyond this, the screenplay is equally frenetic, but for all of the wrong reasons, juggling two distinctly different directions of angling storytelling that battle for screen dominance with diminishing returns. This directly undercuts Neeson’s screentime as an established protagonist in half, in turn feeding into the limitations of the movie’s diminishing memory gimmick, which feels like a temporary inconvenience instead of a debilitating consistency of his character design. Speaking of which, the script’s characterization for everyone limits them to types instead of living, breathing entities. This is especially the case with antagonists, which are not only introduced every fifteen minutes constantly throughout the film, but also persist with similar designs that easily could’ve been molded into one character embodying them all. I’ll move away from the screenplay because I could easily deconstruct it all day with its litany of problems, and instead move to the redundancy of phoned-in performances of the most influential variety. This is first and foremost referring to Neeson, who reads his lines as an obligation instead of an intuition, realized especially with scenes that call upon a deeper sense of grief or guilt to convey the magnitude of the devastation, but never finding such. It’s easy to see how Neeson is bored with the genre at this point, especially considering “Memory” seems like a collection of aspects from his previous films, but when you consider the supporting cast is equally transparent with coldly calculated demeanors, it undersells the engagement in ways that directly take you out of pivotal interactions, made all the more evident with some of the worst audio deposits of the year to obviously override the air of their amateur incompetence. Finally, though no surprise with any of the aforementioned hinderances that blunder this opportunity, the ending is an underwhelming, uneventful blur of an afterthought, with imagination required to elicit the pay-off that we as an audience never receive. Because the film ends with a last minute discovery, it points to one of those resolutions that happen somewhere off in the distance beyond that closing credits scroll, serving as the final blow of intelligence and expectations to an experience littered with unfulfilled potential that it can never even attempt to capitalize on.

OVERALL

Martin Campbell’s “Memory” is better left forgotten as a result of stumbling performances, misguided storytelling, and congested action sequences that sedate its cerebral cortex. Neeson’s once promised retirement from action films have given way to a second act that lacks conviction, and in the case of his latest effort, dulls the senses of cognitive abilities.

My Grade: 2/10 or F-