’s latest piece of watchable-product-that’s-not-as-good-as-he-is, the current movie season has now given us no less than three dramas in which stalwart adults partner with children who wind up showing them the way: the meandering Tom Hanks Western “News of the World”; George Clooney’s flatly dystopian Arctic-tundra-meets-space odyssey “The Midnight Sky”; and now “The Marksman,” in which Neeson, he of the bone-lean gaze and solitary skills, bonds with a just-arrived-from-over-the-border Mexican...
At first, Miguel , silent and doleful in his soccer cap , glowers at Neeson’s Jim Hanson, an Arizona rancher who has fallen on hard times. The boy’s mother, Rosa , got killed during a border scuffle, and if Jim hadn’t first intercepted them her death might not have happened. What we know — and the boy doesn’t — is that if it weren’t for Jim, the cartel would have taken them back to Mexico and killed them anyway, for possessing a cache of money stolen by Rosa’s brother.
Neeson, in a light blue shirt, straw hat, and soulful pained expression, looks like a scarecrow version of Vincent van Gogh, but once the film settles in he wears a worn baseball cap that doesn’t flatter him; it makes him look depressed. Then again, that’s maybe intentional, since Jim is a man who is running on empty. He lost his wife to cancer in a battle that wiped out his assets, and now he can’t pay his mortgage.
As a character, Neeson’s Jim falls into place with a few stray not-quite-convincing traits: He doesn’t own a cell phone , and he tells Miguel a rather doddering anecdote about loving the street hot dogs in Chicago when he was a boy . He’s also a Vietnam veteran who wields a telescopic rifle with a sniper’s flair that makes it seem a more lethal weapon than a machine gun. The bare-bones quirks stick out because Jim is a less furious, more elegiac version of the mad-as-hell Neeson hero.
The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate. Jacob Perez, as Miguel, has the quiet demeanor of a genuine kid, but there are moments when you wish he had more spice to him, that he was a bit more of a cutesy movie kid. You could describe the young heroines of “True Grit” or “Paper Moon” that way, but they live on in your imagination.
All of his roles are boilerplate!
Still, one of the best Liam Neeson movies in years!!
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