Mark Williams’s Blacklight opens with the assassination of an AOC-like progressive. That’s followed by a scene in which F.B.I. agent Travis Block (Liam Neeson) extracts an undercover colleague (Yael Stone) from the trailer park where she’s infiltrated a militant white supremacist group. These sequences gesture toward current political tensions only in the vaguest of ways, but you may find yourself missing that loose connection to the realities of American political life given the toothlessness of the rest of the film.
Blacklight soon pushes these seemingly crucial events aside in order to focus on Travis’s attempts to convince an agent gone rogue, Dusty Crane (Taylor John Smith), to return to the fold of the law. It’s then that we’re bombarded with signs that point to Travis’s overly cautious and obsessive nature, though this characterization ultimately proves to be sketchy at best.
Williams and Nick May’s screenplay conveys a strong enough sense of the extreme, borderline paranoid lengths that Travis is willing to go to in order to ensure the safety of his daughter, Amanda (Claire van der Boom), and granddaughter, Natalie (Gabriella Sengos). But there’s a certain dissonance to the way that Blacklight establishes that he’s driven by obsessiveness, and that he may even suffer from OCD, only to not square that with his actions.
For one, Travis seems almost completely disinterested in what might cause an agent that he knows well to defect from the F.B.I. He also never blinks an eye at the not-so-subtle hints that the agency’s longtime director, Gabe Robinson (Aidan Quin), drops when speaking of ruling through fear and silencing the “millennial soapbox crowd.” For a man who, like many of the tough, no-sense action heroes that Neeson has played, is defined by both his mental and physical prowess, Travis is almost shockingly clueless throughout much of Blacklight.
Travis’s very gradual awakening comes about thanks to Dusty and the struggling clickbait journalist, Mira (Emmy Raver-Lampman), whom he, for some reason, chooses as his sole press contact. The pair reveal an F.B.I. program, Operation Unity, that’s targeting and murdering innocent American citizens, yet the film never addresses why or how such a controversial program came about. Nor does it explain how the F.B.I. director could keep this operation afloat seemingly with the help of only two lackeys (Andrew Shaw and Zac Lemons).
The filmmakers also clearly couldn’t be bothered to explore the depths of the shady government conspiracy at the film’s center, or tie it back to the highly charged political climate captured in those opening sequences. And the end result of such lazy scripting is the audience being forced to constantly speculate as to why things are the way they are.
Instead of elaborating its plot, Blacklight offers up repetitious, dialogue-driven scenes that deliver only the shallowest of exposition, advancing the story at a sluggish pace. We get multiple, go-nowhere scenes of Travis declaring that he wants out of the F.B.I., Natalie telling Travis that he’s too paranoid to spend time with his granddaughter, and Mira insisting that she has a knockout story to her superiors despite having no real proof or details.
Nearly all of these scenes play out in similar fashion, and after a while you get the sense that Blacklight is simply stalling as a means of delaying the inevitable action-driven showdown. And even that confrontation is disappointingly uneventful, as its conclusion is dramatized—or, rather, delivered—by a news article. Of course, that’s not too surprising for a film that repeatedly breaks the golden rule of filmmaking by telling rather than showing.
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