Review: Honest Thief Is a Dried-Out Rehash of the Liam Neeson Actioner

For more than a decade now, Liam Neeson has been primarily identified with the furrowed brows and flying elbows of men with particular sets of skills. Last year, Hans Petter Moland’s Cold Pursuit, with tongue firmly in cheek, seemed to suggest that Neeson’s propensity for playing brooding middle-aged avengers had reached a point of self-parody—á la Arnold Schwarzenegger in James Cameron’s True Lies. But director Mark Williams’s Honest Thief sees Neeson back in earnest “I’ll catch up to those men who wrecked my life” mode—á la Schwarzenegger in Andrew Davis’s Collateral Damage.

Williams’s action thriller casts Neeson’s as unassuming, denim-clad nice guy Tom Dolan, who has led a secret life as a bank robber known by the press-appointed sobriquet “the in and out bandit.” It’s a moniker ripe for riffs about hamburgers or intercourse, but Honest Thief is too stiff—certainly not too sophisticated—a film for wordplay spicier than the trite paradox in its title. Tom’s defining characteristic consists of his absolute lack of irony; in contrast to the jaded men of the Boston F.B.I. department who end up pursuing him, he’s the last bastion of guileless masculine honor. “She means more to me than all the dollar bills in the world,” Neeson utters in his gravelly baritone at one point, referring to the woman, Annie Wilkins (Kate Walsh), who has inspired him to leave his life of crime behind.

If the film doesn’t call up such clichés to mock them, it also doesn’t seem wholly unaware of them. Rather, and perhaps more dangerously, there’s an assertiveness to the way it rehashes corny lines and predictable beats, as if it’s saying that the old clichés—about men and women, about good guys, bad guys, and just deserts—are simply what works, and therefore what’s true. On the other end of the phone call when Tom proclaims the relative worth of his girlfriend is Special Agent Sam Baker (Robert Patrick), who Tom is attempting to turn himself in to, in exchange for a plea bargain. Having received many confessions from individuals claiming to be the bandit, Baker and his recently divorced schlub of a partner, Agent Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan), are slow to act on Tom’s call, delegating the task of conducting an initial interview with the man to two subordinates, Agents Hall (Anthony Ramos) and Nivens (Jai Courtney).

Hall and Nivens, being morally directionless men of a younger generation rather than the upright boomers represented by Tom, Baker, and even the disaffected (but soon reformed) Meyers, scam Tom as soon as they realize he’s the real deal. To verify to Hall and Nivens that he is who he says he is, and trusting in them as representatives of authority, Tom gives them the keys to the storage unit that houses the cash he’s stolen over the years. In a turn that suggests that Williams and co-screenwriter Steve Allrich failed to Google “civil asset forfeiture” during their research for the script, Hall and Nivens decide that they need to lie to their bosses and murder Tom in order to steal his misbegotten money.

Naturally, they flub the murder part of their plan, and Tom ends up on the run, with his irrationally loyal girlfriend accompanying him on car chases through the mysteriously empty streets of Boston. Emptiness more or less sums up Honest Thief’s entire aesthetic. It’s an effect that at first seems unintentional. But then, the film’s interiors are so bare that at times they almost resemble Robert Bresson’s alienated cinematic spaces; its urban exteriors are so strangely devoid of life that their deadness recalls midcentury existentialism, as if this were Taken by Beckett. A rushed and cartoonish final act, though, involving cops colluding in the uncontrolled detonation of parts of suburban Boston puts rest to such reveries.

In any case, the truth of the matter—that the film is a pared-down, dried-out rehash of the half-dozen Neeson vehicles that preceded it—seems almost beside the point. The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another of the actor’s characters defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men, surprising them with hand-to-hand skills honed by Marine training, bashing his stolen car into theirs when flight would have been the safer choice. Taken with all the other iterations of this story, Honest Thief isn’t about Tom, but about Neeson as America’s conservative Dad and his Sisyphean routine of grumbling, growling, and raging at a world in which he no longer seems to belong, and then inevitably doing it all over.