Compared to pretty much every other late-period action star’s career trajectory, Liam Neeson’s got it pretty goddamn good. Take a picture like Mark Williams’ Blacklight, which is a serviceable if timid action thriller that somehow, against all odds, made it into theaters instead of being consigned to the bottom row of a Redbox posted up outside of a Walgreens in Shelby, North Carolina, which is where guys like Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis call home. As a student of Randall Emmett’s filmography as a producer, I can tell you without a doubt that there isn’t an iota of difference between this and, say, Mauraders, and, in fact, the latter is dramatically better as intentional entertainment. But despite the latter film featuring the presence of both Dave “Big Dave” Bautista and Chris “Sexiest Man Alive (Who Also Once Talked to A Can of Beans)” Meloni, Mauraders is hidden away on Netflix, where the algorithm may prevent it from being seen by even the most well-meaning students of Dad Cinema. So why the hell is something like Blacklight getting a wide release?
If you’re thinking to yourself Well, dumbass, it’s because Liam Neeson still draws a crowd, you’re not wrong, and of course, money’s the real reason behind any of this. But even compared to, say, Honest Thief, which featured Neeson operating in the exact same sphere but with a significantly more interesting milieu (you can’t really go wrong with a wacky Jeffery Donovan performance in the middle of your tax write-offs), Blacklight feels particularly bland. Neeson, once again, is playing a man with a very particular set of skills, though, this time, he’s a fixer tasked by his old army buddy (Aidan Quinn, looking like the health inspector from Bob’s Burgers), who is now the director of the FBI, with bringing in rogue agents who threaten the agency’s goals. He’s been a good soldier for a very long time, and he’s hoping that this last job might be a sunset to ride out on — he spent so many years working a morally murky gig that he missed his daughter’s adolescence, and he wants to pick up the slack and be the best grandad he can be. But when the agent he’s tracking down reveals to both Neeson and a journalist that the death of a popular activist and would-be congresswoman might not have been an accident, he begins to question his role in all this, and draws the ire of his former pal, now the director of “the most powerful agency in the world” (which one imagines CIA agents seething over). So, he must fight off goons, protect his family, etc. You know how this goes.
Practically every aspect of Blacklight is lifted from better films in Neeson’s filmography, and the visual contribution that Williams makes to the canon is an After Effects-heavy aesthetic, and at points the digital manipulation of the images within the action sequences is groan-worthy, to say the very least. Digital zooms and random flashes don’t necessarily help with their coherence, or offer any sort of adrenaline-pumping enhancement. The story is no more compelling, with Williams and his co-writer just playing the hits like it’s a farewell show without any of the things that might make it interesting, yet it remains somewhat watchable and engaging precisely because of Neeson’s presence. It’s a matter of presence, I think, that separates him from the rest of his cohort, as he possesses one thing that they don’t: a strange and warm geniality that is as sweetly earnest as it is brute force in its application, which makes his status as Action Grandpa a bizarrely believable one. He’s given a few interesting notes to play with as well here, such as his character’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, which initially seems kind of rote and off-putting in its depiction, yet it’s something that Neeson, when he’s finally able to actually acknowledge it in dialogue, is able to play off with some manner of realism: it can be a blessing (in his line of work) and it can be a curse (in his home life), and his attitude towards it feels true. One thing that can be said for him, in opposition to, say, Sly (perhaps outside of the Creed films) or Seagal or whomever, is that there’s a genuine comfort in his presence in these films that makes even the most outright mediocre of them feel like appointment viewing. Blacklight won’t wow you or even really satisfy you, but it will, perhaps, offer comfort.