#HONEST THIEF REVIEW MOVIE#
#HONEST THIEF REVIEW FULL#
#HONEST THIEF REVIEW TV#

(Wait, you didn’t think the novel coronavirus pandemic was going to keep Neeson off movie screens, did you?) The latest is the theater-bound “Honest Thief,” a competently made, largely uninspired and wholly Neeson-y action-drama about a man trying to come clean about his criminal past so he can spend the rest of his years guilt-free with the woman he loves. Heck, he stars in one or two movies vaguely like 2008’s “Taken” seemingly every year. OK, so it’s Neeson’s now-synonymous-with-him character from the “Taken” movies, Bryan Mills, who actually has the aforementioned “particular set of skills,” but the 68-year-old actor from Northern Ireland has proved to have the attributes to be a consistently bankable action-movie commodity. Signature Entertainment presents Honest Thief on Digital Platforms 5th November and Blu-ray and DVD 8th November.Liam Neeson has a particular set of skills, but can even he rescue the badly beaten theater box office?

#HONEST THIEF REVIEW TV#

Honest Thief opened in cinemas in the US last October and, because there was little competition, made a profit on its $30 million budget but it feels very much like a TV movie and may feel more at home on digital platforms. To put all the blame on the single man – Meyers may be recently divorced, but he has his dog – seems a very old-fashioned, heteronormative move, and no character has any depth to them, and by the end Neeson begins to sound like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs for some strange reason. The real villain is Nivens, played with a slight pantomime touch by Jai Courtney, and his nastiness is underlined by the fact that he is a single man with no children while his partner, a married man with kids, is just gullible rather than evil.

#HONEST THIEF REVIEW FULL#

Are we meant to laugh when Annie, full of loving intention, sees Tom crashing out a hotel window battling a rogue FBI agent? And why does good guy Agent Meyers go around with his dog Tazzie? It may be cute, but the mutt’s presence appears only to symbolise that Meyers is a decent chap, willing to empathise with Tom. To be sure, there are glimmers of comedy, but director Mark Williams seems hesitant in what to do with them. Walsh ( Grey’s Anatomy) always seems on the verge of comedy, and when she finds out about Tom’s secret you wish that it were done with the humour of Jamie Lee Curtis in Total Recall when she finds out that her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger is the special agent. She doesn’t seem shocked that her new boyfriend is a bank robber and within minutes she’s congratulating him on his bomb-making skills. He clearly doesn’t believe it so why should we? His love affair with Annie is more credible, but Kate Walsh has little to do but admire everything that new boyfriend does. The story is ridiculous, and even Neeson seems to think so too, putting little emotion in his lines that explain Tom’s reasons behind his bank robberies and his mundane methodology. Tom realises that he needs to show them the money, but when he does the agents take it for themselves leaving Tom to find penance through other means. Agents John Nivens and Ramon Hall think that Tom is some kind of crank, a confessor of crimes that he didn’t commit.

In return for a light sentence he will hand back all the money to the FBI.īut the FBI doesn’t believe him. He wants to confess to his string of bank robberies that has earned him the moniker of ‘The In and Out Bandit’. He wants to come clean not just to Annie but to the FBI too.

He doesn’t want to base his new relationship on a secret. They fall in love quickly and are about to move in together when Tom suddenly discovers a conscience.

Tom (Neeson) meets Annie when he goes to hide the money he’s stolen in the storage units that she manages. It makes for a sad compromise for date night. Set in a deserted Boston, Honest Thief is so underpowered it’s not entirely clear who the target audience is meant to be: too lovey-dovey for action-seekers and too many explosions for romantics. Caught between romcom and revenge thriller Liam Neeson’s latest vehicle fails to be either and is void of laughs or thrills.

Honest thief review