Liam Neeson has been the go-to star of mid-budget Hollywood action films for 15 years now, and in that time few of those films have made much time for a consideration of the effect that vigilante work has on a middle-aged body. In a sense, Memory serves as a kind of course correction. Moving straight past any kind of “I’m too old for this shit” reckoning, the film finds assassin Alex Lewis (Neeson) already struggling with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease as he strikes out against the slew of bad guys responsible for the execution of a 13-year-old, Beatriz (Mia Sanchez), whom he recently declared off limits.
It’s an interesting concept that offers plenty of opportunity for director Martin Campbell and screenwriter Dario Scardapane to use Alex’s faltering memory and dwindling confidence in his decisions as a means to play with narrative subjectivity. As Alex’s vengeance takes him into the path of an F.B.I. sting to take down a child sex ring, though, these obstacles become less a guiding force of Memory’s style or narrative than a mere character quirk.
At various points during the film, we see Alex scrawling notes on his forearm with a sharpie and forgetting where he stashed a crucial piece of evidence. But his mental decline rarely feels deeply integrated into how the narrative unfolds, and when Alex gets down to business, he has no problem strapping his former employer (Lee Boardman) in a car before blowing it up or dispatching men half his age with relative ease. Even after being hit by a bullet that would likely bring down a velociraptor, he’s only slowed down a bit. In short, Alex is the same old Liam Neeson action hero, only afflicted with intermittently inconvenient brain fog.
As F.B.I. Agent Vincent Serra, Guy Pearce actually gets the meatier role here, as the man’s desperate attempts to get justice for Beatriz are restricted by two superiors (Ray Fearon and Ray Stevenson) who second guess his every move and doubt the strength of whatever evidence he gathers. Like Alex, Vincent takes Beatriz’s death personally, but the balancing act that he performs between both sides of the law lends his endeavors an additional sense of urgency.
With Alex and Vincent’s end goals being the same, Memory sets up an uneasy alliance between the men, though it fails to intersect their journeys in compelling ways. And while hints of backstory surface throughout, they ultimately feel like flimsy reasons to suggest the impetus for both men’s investment in wanting to take down the child sex ring and everyone involved with it. Neeson and Pearce take their roles seriously, and their performances are strong enough to make up for some of the script’s shortcomings, but Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.
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