movie review memory liam neeson

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

Now that Nicolas Cage has had his stock upgraded as of late (thanks to his lovely performance in “Pig” and his self-aware turn in the recent “ The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent ”), and Bruce Willis has retired, I suspect that Liam Neeson is going to be the next actor who finds himself in the critical crosshairs for doing far too many forgettable movies. His latest, “Memory,” is already his second such film in 2022, and since his list of upcoming projects on IMDb mentions titles like “Retribution,” “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” “The Revenger” and “Cold Pursuit Sequel Project,” it doesn’t appear that he will be disembarking this particular gravy train anytime soon. To his credit, “Memory” is at least slightly more ambitious than most of the similar films Neeson has done recently. But it's certainly not enough to make you overlook how one of our most powerful actors is again wasting his time on the kind of half-baked thriller Charles Bronson used to crank out with depressing regularity during the waning days of his career.

The time around, Neeson plays Alex Lewis , another expert hired killer with a particular set of skills. As this film opens, he's considering leaving the life behind after seeing signs of the Alzheimer’s that has already claimed his brother. Nevertheless, Alex accepts one final job in El Paso, in which he has to bump off two separate people and recover some important flash drives from the first victim. He pulls off the first hit easily enough but when he discovers that the second victim is a 12-year-old girl ( Mia Sanchez ), Alex refuses to pull the trigger and keeps the flash drives for himself as an insurance policy.

Unfortunately, the girl had been pimped out by her father to a number of wealthy and powerful people, including the depraved son of powerful real estate developer Davana Sealman ( Monica Bellucci ), who put out the original hit in order to help her child evade justice. After tying up that loose end, she also calls for Alex to be killed. But even though he's slipping mentally, he's still skillful enough to evade her hired goons and kill everyone remotely connected to the crime. Alex also plants enough clues for an FBI task force led by Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce ), who also tried to help the girl and feels guilty about what happened to her, to pursue him while always remaining one step ahead of them.

If the basic story points of “Memory” sound familiar to you, it may be that you've seen “ The Memory of a Killer ,” the 2003 Belgian crime drama that has been Americanized here (with both films based on Jef Geeraerts ’ novel The Alzheimer Case ). Although this version more or less follows the same narrative path of its predecessor, the original film, although a perfectly good genre film in its own right, was more interested in its central character (played in a very good performance by Jan Decleir ) as he is forced to reckon with both the weight of his past misdeeds and the cruelties of his present condition. 

“Memory” does begin to work when Neeson gets a hold of script's more dramatically impactful moments, but these scenes are simply too few and far between to be truly effective. Dario Scardapane ’s screenplay tends to put more of an emphasis on the big action beats, which are implausible enough as is and doubly so when you consider that they involve a character with deteriorating cognitive abilities. Although these scenes are handled with some style by director Martin Campbell , whose oeuvre includes one of the very best James Bond films (“Casino Royale”) and a lot of stuff that will be politely overlooked here, they wind up overwhelming the human drama involving Neeson’s character. This is especially evident during a new, less thoughtful finale in which one of the key villains is dispatched in an especially gruesome manner in order to give the gorehounds in the audience a final thrill before the end credits. Other than Neeson, the only performance of note here comes from Bellucci, whose casting here is unexpected, to say the least.

“Memory” is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well. Yes, a little more effort has gone into the making of "Memory," so it's a shame—and an ironic one to boot—that the end results are so forgettable.

Now playing in theaters.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

Now playing

Boy Kills World

Simon abrams.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Brian tallerico.

You Can't Run Forever

The Idea of You

Matt Zoller Seitz

Glenn Kenny

Film credits.

Memory (2022)

Rated R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout.

114 minutes

Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis

Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra

Taj Atwal as Linda Amistead

Harold Torres as Hugo Marquez

Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman

Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora

Stella Stocker as Maya

Antonio Jaramillo as Papa Leon

• Martin Campbell

Writer (book)

• Jef Geeraerts
• Dario Scardapane

Cinematographer

• David Tattersall

Latest blog posts

Fear, Hope, and Joy: Ramata-Toulaye Sy on Banel and Adama

When ‘Bad Boys’ Began, Martin Lawrence Was the Top Dog

Expecto Patronus: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at 20

Female Filmmakers in Focus: Bridgett M. Davis

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Memory’ Review: Getting Too Old for This

In this action thriller, Liam Neeson plays an assassin struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not as interesting as it sounds.

• Share full article

By Lena Wilson

The premise of “Memory,” the latest action thriller from the “Casino Royale” director Martin Campbell, is fascinating: Liam Neeson plays Alex Lewis, an aging assassin struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. As Alex seeks vengeance against a child trafficking operation in El Paso, he becomes increasingly unpredictable to the F.B.I. team tracking him, led by the contemplative agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce). Unique premise aside, “Memory” is an absurd slog. Its plot clichés and wooden performances are far more enduring than its narrative.

This is a remake of the 2005 Belgian film “The Memory of a Killer,” which was a critical success. “Memory,” then, is yet another embarrassing American adaptation. It plays as if the worst episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” have all been processed in a blender and then stretched to nearly two hours long. The script, by Dario Scardapane, is threadbare in some parts and redundant in others. Its treatment of female characters is, at best, bleak. There are multiple pauses for eye roll-inducing genre fare, like a violent police interrogation or a shot of the grizzled Agent Serra staring out a window and drinking Scotch. The American characters are performed almost entirely by British or Australian actors, a choice that might be less noticeable in a film not set in Texas.

Neeson is fine and gets to hit his standard action movie beats, like growling out threats and bedding a much younger woman. But he’s also surprisingly underutilized — the film shifts focus to Agent Serra early on, leaving Alex and his disability to languish in the shadows. Whatever appeal this film had in its original iteration has been sapped out, leaving a story that, when not completely vexing, is either mind-numbing or hilarious by accident.

Memory Rated R for bullets in brains and damsels in distress. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

The director Pablo Berger broke down how he brought a New York street scene to life  in “Robot Dreams,” his Oscar-nominated animated film about the friendship between a dog and a robot.

Cleopatra Coleman’s versatility has allowed the actor to stay relatively anonymous, but that may change with “Clipped,”  her new docudrama about an N.B.A. scandal.

The documentary “Jim Henson Idea Man,” directed by Ron Howard, doesn’t ignore the Muppet mastermind’s faults, but the tribute has a lot to teach creators everywhere .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Hit Man Link to Hit Man
• Am I OK? Link to Am I OK?
• Jim Henson Idea Man Link to Jim Henson Idea Man

New TV Tonight

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• Ren Faire: Season 1
• Sweet Tooth: Season 3
• Clipped: Season 1
• Queenie: Season 1
• Mayor of Kingstown: Season 3
• Becoming Karl Lagerfeld: Season 1
• Criminal Minds: Season 17
• Power Book II: Ghost: Season 4
• Erased: WW2's Heroes of Color: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Eric: Season 1
• Dark Matter: Season 1
• Tires: Season 1
• Evil: Season 4
• Star Wars: Ahsoka: Season 1
• Trying: Season 4
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1 Link to Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

The Bad Boys Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

All 73 Disney Animated Movies Ranked

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

House of the Dragon : Season 2 First Reviews: Gorgeous and Expertly Crafted, with Epic Dragon Fights

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

• Trending on RT
• The Acolyte First Reviews
• Vote: 1999 Movie Showdown
• The Watchers

Memory Reviews

I do applaud Memory for accomplishing the impossible, which is to make you forget about virtually every aspect of the film by the time the lights go back up in the cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Mar 6, 2024

Memory seethes with evil deeds and evil-doers motivated by nothing more than greed and a lust for power. And for once, Neeson’s character isn’t a blinding ray of light purifying everything around him through sheer will power and clenched fists.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2022

An above-average Liam Neeson action piece...Aimed squarely at an adult audience that doesn't mind lots of plot talk, veteran director Martin Campbell gives th proceedings an usually jagged edge that lifts it above more formula-minded genre pieces.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 30, 2022

Personally I think what Liam Neeson should do is order a hit on the role of hit man and have a go at doing something different.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 18, 2022

[Memory] offers only predictable plotting and fitful thrills.

Full Review | Oct 7, 2022

Casino Royale director Martin Campbell makes great use of his locations, but the film is unlikely to linger long in your own memory.

Full Review | Oct 6, 2022

Props to Campbell and Neeson for trying to spice up the usual murderous melange, but <i>Memory</i> ends up just as forgettable as all those other flicks.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 16, 2022

You can pretty much forget about it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 23, 2022

... An empty, repetitive, and ultimately, forgettable. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 25, 2022

When it comes to his thriller outings, autopilot is the only speed he [Neeson] has.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 14, 2022

The unnecessarily convoluted psychological thriller “Memory” proves two things: 1) That Liam Neeson, when he wants to, can really act; and, 2) that Liam Neeson acting doesn’t mesh well with Liam Neeson being an action star.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 29, 2022

It is a Liam Neeson movie, no more no less - it is a Liam Neeson movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 22, 2022

... Lots of fights, lots of chases, lots of bullets, lots of death. Lots of lots. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 20, 2022

Although this new film is not exceptional, it has a few aces up its sleeve. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 19, 2022

Memory is ironically named, because it is yet another Liam Neeson movie that you will completely forget about as soon as you reach the parking lot.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 19, 2022

Memory isn't a Neeson action vehicle nor the sordid noir the original was, resulting in an acceptable yet inconsequential movie. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 17, 2022

Set to turn 70 in June, Liam Neeson is still on his game in this forgettable action thriller in which he plays a professional assassin suffering from the beginning stages of Alzheimer's/dementia.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 13, 2022

By no means is this thriller destined to become a classic, but it’s a satisfying indulgence.

Full Review | May 10, 2022

I wish I could forget it!

[Neeson's] charm is dulled by Lewis' failing mind and a script that neglects backstory and character development, all of which leave us feeling detached from his performance ... If given the choice to strike Memory from our own memory, we gladly would.

Full Review | May 9, 2022

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Liam neeson in ‘memory’: film review.

Guy Pearce co-stars as an FBI agent in a remake of a Belgian crime thriller involving a child trafficking ring and a hitman struggling with Alzheimer’s.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

The premise of Memory just might be the mother of all high concepts: A hired assassin has Alzheimer’s. It instantly evokes two possible interpretations: bruising black comedy would be one, thoughtful musing on life and death the other. In especially deft hands, a third option would meld the two. As directed by Martin Campbell from a screenplay by Dario Scardapane, and even with a couple of soulful actors at its center, that premise plays out as none of the above; it’s a mechanical plot point in a perfunctory actioner that leaves laughs — intentional ones, anyway — and existential meditations by the wayside.

Adapting the 2003 Belgian feature The Memory of a Killer , based on the novel De Zaak Alzheimer ( The Alzheimer Case ), Memory comes equipped with all the accoutrements of the contract-killer genre: the burner phones, the silencers, the laser sights, the Liam Neeson . This time, though, Neeson isn’t the law-and-order guy wielding questionable methods in the name of justice, but the mercenary who is faced with an unacceptable assignment — his target is a 13-year-old girl — and trying to do the right thing before his dimming cognitive lights go out permanently.

Related Stories

Emotional david cronenberg unveils horror-filled meditation on grief 'the shrouds' at cannes, liam neeson and sharon stone express support for kevin spacey's hollywood return: "he is a genius".

Release date: Friday, April 29

Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Ray Stevenson, Harold Torres

Director: Martin Campbell

Screenwriter: Dario Scardapane

To believe, as we’re meant to, that Neeson’s Alex Lewis spent his formative years in El Paso, Texas, where most of the action is set, would require its own cognitive disconnect. Then again, the production was shot mainly in Bulgaria, and there’s a vaguely intercontinental, pan-European vibe to the cast, from small supporting roles to Monica Bellucci ’s spiritless rendering of a villainous bigwig.

But the Lone Star State is meant to be more than a state of mind in Memory . It’s meant to put a topical slant on a storyline involving the abuse and trafficking of children. The teenager who Alex refuses to kill is an undocumented immigrant; a detention center for such children proves to be a vicious nexus of public and private interests; and the real-life unsolved murders of countless girls and women in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, haunts and drives a key character.

For all its questions of morality, mortality and politics, the film feels empty at its core, not unlike the sleek modern spaces where the story’s ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt and ultra-clichéd scheme and cavort joylessly. Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell ( Casino Royale , The Protégé ) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

As the movie opens, Alex pulls off a hit of gruesome expertise in a Guadalajara hospital, a scene that’s mirrored, with even more blood, in the film’s final stretch. However ruthless a killing machine Alex may be, his humanizing predicament becomes clear when, returning to his car after dispatching his victim, he struggles for a painful moment to remember where he put his car key. The pills he takes are designed to forestall the inevitable, and to help maintain an even keel he scrawls factoids on his inner forearm for easy reference. Neeson signals Alex’s frustration and his acknowledgment of defeat. He’s ready to quit this crazy business, a decision that his Mexico City contact Mauricio (Lee Boardman) rejects, hoisting a fat envelope of cash at him with instructions to kill two people in El Paso, a town Alex knows well.

After dispatching target No. 1, a well-to-do businessman (Scot Williams), and retrieving an item from his safe, Alex discovers that the second would-be victim is 13-year-old Beatriz (Mia Sanchez). With his customary violence, he lets his smarmy local handler (Daniel de Bourg) know that he wants the contract canceled, setting off a new round of cat-and-mouse in which he’s the quarry.

FBI agent Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce ), meanwhile, has taken a particular interest in Beatriz, who was being pimped by her father (Antonio Jaramillo) and is now orphaned, after a sting by Vincent’s team, the agency’s Child Exploitation Task Force, goes spectacularly wrong. Vincent’s boss, Gerald Nussbaum (Ray Fearon), puts the task force on ice and sends Mexican investigator Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres) packing. But Hugo finds a reason to stick around, and neither Vincent nor his partner, Linda Amisted (Taj Atwal), is eager to pivot to run-of-the-mill local crimes. An El Paso detective (Ray Stevenson) isn’t thrilled to have them around, and Alex, in his last-ditch pursuit of truth and justice, is one step ahead of them all. If only he can remember where he put that flash drive filled with incriminating audio.

Scardapane (producer-writer of the series The Bridge and The Punisher ) advances the story via information drops posing as conversation. Case in point: “You realize we’re talking about one of the most powerful real estate moguls in the country, right?” Bellucci’s Davana Sealman, the mogul in question, pulls many puppet strings in the city, a power that her hedonistic son (Josh Taylor) depends on. The pileup of one-note characters also includes a prostitute (Stella Stocker) working the bar at Alex’s hotel, and a trophy-wife stereotype (Natalie Anderson) who feels like something out of a subpar Raymond Chandler knockoff, or an unintended spoof of one.

The involvement of Pearce is a wink and a nod to his role in a classic of the memory-affliction subgenre, Memento , a taut and masterful thriller in whose shadow Memory withers. Pearce is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and his performance is the strongest, most sustained and convincing element of the film — and one that frequently finds him in a vacuum.

He enters the story delivering a performance within a performance: In the attempted sting, Vincent poses as a john seeking the company of an underage girl. Even after he’s shaken off the layers of scuzz required for that role, there’s something off about Vincent, a sense that he’s uncared for. The explanation arrives in an eleventh-hour revelation that should be crushing in its sadness but is instead awkward in its narrative ineptitude.

To give that disclosure its intended impact, Campbell would have had to stir up certain undercurrents in the characters who interact with Vincent. Atwal comes closest in a final exchange that, against the odds in a movie that can feel propelled by an algorithm, produces a satisfying emotional zing.

However unsubtle the material, Neeson offers unforced glimmers of a soul lost to brutality as Alex wavers between a thickening mental fog and perfect lucidity when the plot demands it. But there’s also a sense of his effortless screen magnetism being shoehorned into a thriller boilerplate. And it’s tempting to imagine, when Alex is staring into the middle distance, forgetting where he is and why, that Neeson might be remembering when he played complex men like Alfred Kinsey and Michael Collins.

Full credits

Distributors: Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films Production companies: Black Bear Pictures, Welle Entertainment, Saville Productions Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Ray Stevenson, Harold Torres, Josh Taylor, Antonio Jaramillo, Daniel De Bourg, Scot Williams, Stella Stocker, Rebecca Calder, Atanas Srebrev, Lee Boardman, Natalie Anderson, Mia Sanchez Director: Martin Campbell Screenwriter: Dario Scardapane Based on the book De Zaak Alzheimer by Jef Geeraerts and on the picture De Zaak Alzheimer by Carl Joos and Erik Van Looy Producers: Cathy Schulman, Moshe Diamant, Rupert Maconick, Michael Heimler, Arthur Sarkissian Executive producers: Teddy Schwarzman, Ben Stillman, Peter Bouckaert, Rudy Durand, Tom Ortenberg, James Masciello, Matthew Sidari Director of photography: David Tattersall Production designer: Wolf Kroeger Costume designer: Irina Kotcheva Editor: Jo Francis Music: Rupert Parkes Casting: Pam Dixon, Dan Hubbard

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘rebel nun’ review: sister helen prejean, the activist who inspired ‘dead man walking,’ gets a lackluster doc portrait, alan scarfe, ‘double impact’ and ‘seven days’ actor, dies at 77, george clooney called white house to defend wife helping bring war crimes case against israeli leaders (report), ‘wallace & gromit’ film gets title, christmas release as iconic villain feathers mcgraw seeks revenge, netflix shows off massive “no guardrails” animation slate with ‘terminator,’ zack snyder’s ‘twilight of the gods’, bentonville film festival sets lineup for ‘geena & friends’ event, unveils additional programming.

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

In Memory, Liam Neeson Gets to Act More Than Usual

Even those of us who’ve generally enjoyed Liam Neeson’s recent run of tough-guy roles sometimes forget that he can be a hell of a performer, too. His latest, Memory , directed by action legend Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale , The Mask of Zorro ), offers a helpful reminder that Neeson kicking ass need not mean Neeson on acting autopilot. The film, a remake of the 2003 Belgian thriller The Memory of a Killer , follows a hitman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, but the dementia element is more a narrative contrivance than a serious exploration of a debilitating illness. (For that, you might want to check out Gaspar Noé’s Vortex instead, also out this week.) But Neeson, who had been an intensely physical actor even before he started playing guys with special sets of skills, conveys the vulnerability, pain, and fear of the character so well that he turns a nothing plot element into something genuinely moving.

When we first meet Alex Lewis (Neeson), he’s posing as a nurse in order to brutally strangle a man visiting his sick mother in the hospital. Our hero is not a good guy: Alex has spent his life killing people for money, often at the behest of gangsters operating in and around El Paso, Texas. But when he’s given a job that involves targeting a young girl, he refuses to kill her. Is this a sign of a humanity he’s always had, or is it a newfound hesitancy brought on by his condition? “You’re going soft,” his boss, Mauricio (Lee Boardman), says, bitterly.

A greater conspiracy is unfolding, however. The girl, Beatriz (Mia Sanchez), was a child-trafficking victim, and a dogged FBI agent, Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce, who himself starred in Memento 22 years ago, a film to which Memory occasionally nods), is hoping she will be the witness to help him take down a massive human-trafficking operation. The conspiracy, however, reaches through the upper levels of El Paso society, including the family of local businesswoman and philanthropist Davana Sealman (Monica Bellucci). While Serra and his partners, among whom is Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres) of the Mexican intelligence agency, encounter obstacles legal and otherwise, Alex seems to be the one person who can cut through all that red tape — a deadly lone wolf with what is now a personal grudge and not a lot of time left.

That results in an intriguing confusion of loyalties that the film probably could have done more with; Serra and his crew are torn over whether to try and stop Alex or to let him work his killing-machine magic. But overall, Memory works not so much as a procedural — it’s a bit too simply plotted for that — as it does as a character study. Credit the actors, and director Campbell’s willingness to give them their space. Neeson, in particular, is well-suited to portray Alex’s growing fragility. When he wakes up in the middle of the night, haunted by the images of people he may or may not have killed, his fear and confusion are overwhelming. The actor has always had a thing for suffering; even his action movies are on some level about shame and regret and intense personal pain . But what was submerged in the previous movies is out in the open this time. One scene where Alex cauterizes a bullet wound in his torso with a bottle of liquor and a lighter is so agonizing that I’d believe it if you told me Neeson had actually burned himself.

There’s an interesting edge to the action, too. Alex smashes heads and blows away people (not all of them bad guys, either) with ruthless, automatic efficiency, but it all feels reflexive, as if it’s been programmed into his muscle memory. That speaks to why he’s able to keep offing people even as he seems to be losing his cognitive abilities. He’s been killing for so long that it comes as naturally to him as breathing. That makes for a compelling contrast: On the one hand, we get surprisingly effective and visceral violence — the genre spectacle at which Campbell has always excelled — and on the other, a very real tenderness and anguish that’s quite rare in this sort of flick. In the end, Memory ’s greatest asset might be that it knows exactly what it is — a fun combination of sleazoid action and surprising emotion. It’s the best kind of B-movie.

• movie review
• liam neeson
• martin campbell
• alzheimer's disease
• memory of a killer
• monica bellucci

Most Viewed Stories

• It’s the End of Paramount+ As We’ve Known It (and That’s Fine)
• Cinematrix No. 74: June 6, 2024
• Hacks Isn’t a Good Comedy
• Appetite for More Hunger Games Will Be Met
• The Acolyte Is Not the Star Wars You Were Looking For
• Andy Cohen Vs. the Housewives  
• Can Industry Succeed Succession ?

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Memory (I) (2022)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Memory’ Review: Liam Neeson Plays a Senile Hitman in a Dull Sex Trafficking Thriller

David ehrlich.

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

At a time when each new Liam Neeson action thriller has become utterly indistinguishable from the last, Martin Campbell ’s “ Memory ” would at least seem to have a unique hook: In this one, the lanky Irishman plays a contract killer who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Surely that should be enough to help the latest page in the Redbox chapter of Neeson’s career stand out from the likes of “The Ice Road,” “The Marksman,” and the rest of the post-“Taken” glut.

Mix in Monica Bellucci as the Jeffrey Epstein-esque queenpin of a child prostitution ring, Guy Pearce — no stranger to stories about anterograde amnesia — as a mustached FBI agent prone to wearily saying things like “Memory’s a motherfucker,” and pliable source material (the 2003 Belgian thriller “The Alzheimer Case”) that’s enriched by its new setting along Texas’ southern border, and it sounds like the recipe for a solid little programmer. It sounds like the kind of C+ B-movie that’s just good enough to convince you that Neeson still has some skin in the game. “Memory” even boasts a last-minute cameo from America’s sweetheart, Jake Tapper!

Sure enough, the opening sequence alone offers more bang for your buck than the entirety of February’s “Blacklight.” It starts with grizzled hitman Alex Lewis (Neeson) disguising himself as a nurse at a Guadalajara hospital, murdering some young doofus with piano wire while the victim’s intubated mother helplessly watches from her bed, and then fleeing the scene in an Oldsmobile station wagon. It’s fun, it’s brutal, and it’s fully in command of Neeson’s screen image as a homicidal grandpa who’s killed more people than he could ever hope to remember — senile or not.

Even more promising is the seemingly unrelated scene that follows on the other side of the Rio Grande, where undercover FBI agent Vincent Serra (Pearce) rescues a preteen Mexican girl from her pimp father by posing as a customer. Serra even pays the girl a visit at the overcrowded detention center to which she’s transferred for deportation, and laments how little the law allows him to do for a child in such desperate need of help. What ties all of these characters together won’t be revealed for a very, very, very long time, but layering their introductions on top of each other seems to anticipate an unusually humane thriller that balances the mental decay of an expert hitman against the moral awakening of a useless fed.

Alas, while that is — in broad strokes — what Dario Scardapane’s convoluted screenplay attempts to do, “Memory” is indeed a motherfucker. Not only that, it’s also a perversely generic waste of an intriguing premise, as the failure of this dull and schlocky mess is made all the more frustrating (and bizarre) by the film’s apparent disinterest in Alex’s dementia. Yes, the guy can be forgetful. He’s prone to writing broad instructions for himself on his arm — not quite “shoot person in face,” but close — and at one point he orders an iced tea mere seconds after one is served to him. Alex knows, having watched his brother deteriorate from the same condition, that things are only going to get worse from here, and that motivates him to retire from a business that people only tend to leave in a bodybag.

And yet, Alex’s failing memory is often dramatized as a more general kind of incompetence; he doesn’t seem like a sick hitman so much as a bad one. He forgets to put the firing pin back into a pistol. He downloads sensitive client information onto a thumb drive. He spectacularly fails to protect a nice sex worker from getting shot in the neck, despite the fact that she spent the night with him for free — even the rusty killer George Clooney’s played in “The American” was able to keep that cliché alive! One genuinely fraught moment, in which Alex mistakenly assumes that he murdered the innocent child whose death is splashed across the local news, isn’t enough to salvage a character whose failing memory is less a poignant source of personal urgency than an occasional trick of narrative convenience.

Triggered by his refusal to shoot the same girl who Serra rescues from the clutches of Belluci’s human trafficking operation, Alex’s last-ditch attempt to do something good before he forgets that he can is clear enough in broad strokes, but his terminal case of atonement is handled in such clumsy fashion that even the film seems to grow bored of it. In fact, Alex may not even be the true protagonist of this story, as the jaded Serra — along with his squad of ethically ambiguous underlings, whose dialogue is so wooden that it seems like the actors are grimacing through fresh splinters with every line — gradually finds himself at the center of the action.

Although “action” might be too generous a term to describe the film’s sporadic bursts of close-up gunfire. One of them, set in an El Paso parking garage, is cleverly edited to express Alex’s growing confusion; all of them are used to punctuate an endless parade of dramatic scenes in which Serra tries to answer the various questions that Alex’s storyline has already spelled out for the audience (at least Pearce livens things up with a light Texas lilt and a well-earned frustration with America’s immigration laws). The most excitingly choreographed movement in the entire movie is a shot of two golf carts driving past each other at full-speed in the lobby of a corporate tower.

There’s a sense that Scardapane is hoping his screenplay’s parallel threads will organically knot into a noose à la “No Country for Old Men,” but it takes an entire hour of turgid setup before Alex and Serra finally cross paths, and the drama only frays apart even further when it tries to pretend these men anything to each other. “Memory is a motherfucker,” Serra reminds us, “and as for justice… it ain’t guaranteed.” But everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

Open Road Films will release “Memory” in theaters on Friday, April 29.

Most Popular

You may also like.

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Noirish ‘Memory’ is a cut above the average Liam Neeson action flick

A hit man with Alzheimer’s disease develops a conscience when he’s hired to kill a 13-year-old girl

There’s a sameness to many of the roles Liam Neeson takes these days. With a few notable recent exceptions that still prove his depth and range — “ Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House ,” “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ,” “ Ordinary Love ” — the Oscar-nominated star of “ Schindler’s List ” has lately become more associated with action thrillers in which he plays a certain type: an emotionally damaged, perhaps even demon-driven antihero/loner plagued by alcoholism, an ethically compromised past, grief or some other psychic pain whose quest for redemption has turned him into an avenging angel. The quality of these films fluctuates between satisfying and disappointing, for the same reason. Because Neeson is so adept at rendering this stock character, he doesn’t always work very hard at it. Sometimes that effortlessness is a pleasure, and sometimes it just feels lazy.

Liam Neeson, a beloved action star who can pack an emotional punch

In plot, at least, “Memory” is no exception. Based on the 1985 novel “De Zaak Alzheimer” by Belgian writer Jef Geeraerts and its 2003 Belgian film adaptation, “The Memory of a Killer,” Neeson’s latest genre exercise centers on a hit man with dementia who suddenly sprouts a conscience when one of the targets he’s been hired to kill turns out to be a 13-year-old girl. And yet “Memory” is a cut above average, for this sort of thing. Mostly that’s thanks to the direction of Martin Campbell (“ Casino Royale ”), who injects the same freshness of energy into this formulaic outing that he did with last year’s assassin thriller “ The Protege .”

“Memory” feels more like film noir — deliciously dark, cynical and slightly amoral — than a pulpy piece of rote storytelling.

Neeson, for one thing, isn’t really the good guy here, or really even the bad guy with a heart of gold. His Alex Lewis is a coldblooded killer. With one exception — the barely teenage prostitute (Mia Sanchez) Alex refuses to kill after he’s hired to kill a couple of people to cover up a child-exploitation ring — he has few qualms about whom he murders. Cops, in particular, are so much collateral damage in Alex’s single-minded mission to take out the members of the international sex-trafficking cartel. The fact that he’s starting to lose his memory, and must write reminders down on his forearm with a Sharpie, barely makes him more sympathetic.

It’s a weird feeling, not being able to root wholeheartedly for Neeson. But I kind of like it. It feels honest, and less pandering.

Some cops, however, are spared. Two members of the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force (Guy Pearce and Taj Atwal), along with a Mexican detective (Harold Torres) on loan to the FBI, are allowed to live so they can perform cleanup on the messy pile of corpses Alex leaves behind in his path of vengeance. Mostly, as Pearce’s Agent Vincent Serra observes, that entails “taking out” the traffickers whom Vincent and the task force aren’t legally able to execute, while leaving the feds a trail of “breadcrumbs.”

Vincent’s pursuit of Alex, while following those breadcrumbs, is the engine that drives the plot. (The casting of Pearce, who in 2001’s “ Memento ” played an amnesiac pursuing his wife’s killer while marking his own body with clues, is a nice sort of callback.)

“Memory” is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind. That’s the film’s mix of moral ambiguity and the regret of someone for whom it’s too late to undo the past, but not perhaps to rectify the present, even when the law can’t. In the words of Vincent: “Memory’s a mother-f---er. And as for justice, it ain’t guaranteed.”

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, some bloody images, brief nudity, mature thematic elements and coarse language throughout. 114 minutes.

Despite a gifted cast, Memory only evokes better films

If only the forgettable nature of this hitman film featuring liam neeson, guy pearce, and monica bellucci was deliberately ironic.

“I can tell you he’s an American,” declares FBI Agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), with absolutely unmerited confidence, upon hearing the voice of [checks notes]… Liam Neeson. No disrespect intended to Mr. Neeson, mind you, who’s one of the world’s finest movie-star actors and cinema’s current most dependable old-man ass-kicker. But he sounds about as American as Sean Connery. In a movie where at least three of the leads—Pearce, Neeson, and Ray Stevenson—adopt fake American accents, Neeson’s is, impressively, the least convincing. And that’s taking into account the scene in which Stevenson’s Texas lawman, taking incoming gunfire, yells “ LAHV shootuh! Lahv shootuh! ”

Related Content

Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a hitman who’s having memory problems. Notes written to himself on his arms help—a trick borrowed from costar Pearce’s character in Memento— but really, it’s time to retire. And perhaps in real life, hitmen can. But in the movies, they always get forced into one last job, even when it’s clear their employers’ money would be much better spent on somebody who, y’know, still likes doing the thing they’re good at. Instead, suddenly conscientious Alex gets pressured into taking a contract, recoils when it involves a kid, and decides to spend the rest of his short, terminally ill life taking out those who made him do it before the cops and feds can.

Memory is officially a remake of a Belgian movie released in the U.S. as The Memory Of A Killer , based on the Dutch novel The Alzheimer Case . Maintaining the original’s underage sex ring plot and relocating it to Texas and Mexico allows Memory to take on the two biggest conservative bugaboos-du-jour: pedophilia and the border. And in typical action movie fashion, it suggests rather unambiguously that rogue hitmen are better at taking care of society’s problems than incompetent and compromised law enforcement. Not that you should think too hard about the movie’s politics, because it doesn’t seem like anyone involved in making it did.

While his political ear may not be astute, director Martin Campbell , like Neeson’s character, used to be one of the best in his field. An expert at crafting expensive, nail-biting action scenes surrounding iconic, super-heroic characters, he brought style and tension to bear in his James Bond, Zorro, and yes, Green Lantern movies. (Even Ryan Reynolds underrates that last one.) Hell, Vertical Limit , a movie with no memorable characters whatsoever, works only because of the insane amounts of danger into which Campbell hurls his onscreen cast. When it comes to more story-based exploits of men with guns, however, he’s occasionally as adrift as his latest protagonist.

Simply put, the director’s urge to make a big action movie here is as palpable as his lack of a mega-budget to do so. Neeson’s frail older hitman still manages to effortlessly smash heads through windows, and shatter a toilet by throwing a bad guy into it—and in something like a Bad Boys movie, this would all fit the tone, as would Neeson’s disinterest in learning accents. But they stick out as anomalies in Memory , which otherwise tries to be a grounded thriller. That’s even as Campbell clearly gets the most joy out of shooting decadent boat parties, and fancy indoor swimming pools that look like something out of an alien world.

Neeson’s attachment undoubtedly got the movie greenlit, but one of the virtues of its source material, The Memory Of A Killer, is the opportunity its characters give all of the actors to create roles largely from scratch, at least for most American audiences. Pearce, in hair and wardrobe apparently purloined from the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video, does his best to de-glam, at least. But Campbell still films his stars like stars, and Neeson’s supposed dementia doesn’t affect the plot anywhere near as much as it should.

There’s never a moment when anyone might think he risks looking genuinely embarrassing in the way that all Alzheimer’s patients do at one point or another. You could substitute almost any disability, injury, or even phobia into the script and the plot wouldn’t change much. On the other hand, exchanging Ray Stevenson into the lead role might have been more interesting, as he really does look his age in this, while Neeson, more than a decade his elder, continues to defy it.

Nonetheless, it’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.

‘Memory’ Review: Hit-Man Movie Remake Is a Retread of Familiar Liam Neeson Roles

Liam Neeson plays a bad guy who goes after worse guys, while the onset of Alzheimer's complicates matters, in this tough, déjà vu action movie.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

• ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ Review: Viggo Mortensen Disappears From His Own Western for a Spell, Letting Vicky Krieps Lead 7 days ago
• Cannes Awards: Female-Centered Stories Win Big in Cannes, as Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ Earns Palme d’Or 2 weeks ago
• ‘The Most Precious of Cargoes’ Review: An Animated Fable From the Director of ‘The Artist’ Finds Hope in the Holocaust 2 weeks ago

The less you remember about 2003 Belgian thriller “ Memory of a Killer,” the better, when it comes to its remake, directed by “Casino Royale” veteran Martin Campbell . Relocated to El Paso, Texas, this new version — which channels the brutal cynicism of recent Taylor Sheridan movies, or the even more ruthless tone of Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” — takes the bones of a tough European crime drama and uses them as the grim gallows on which to hang yet another nihilistic Liam Neeson action vehicle.

These days, such Liam Neeson movies unofficially constitute a genre unto themselves. Starting with “Taken,” the Oscar-nominated actor who so sensitively played one of the screen’s great savers of souls in “Schindler’s List” has been reborn as a symbol of retribution. “Taken” came out in 2010, the year after the shocking skiing accident of real-life wife Natasha Richardson, and it has felt as if the actor himself was transformed by that tragedy, hollowed out and reduced to a rage machine. He is, as the mad dad in that movie said, a man with “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career,” skills that have been unexpectedly honed into this incredibly specific, incredibly lethal persona.

Related Stories

How content spending will grow in the post-peak tv era, 'christmas eve in miller's point' review: a sweet, nostalgic love letter to suburban holiday-season rituals.

In film after film, multiple times a year, Neeson plays men who power forward in pursuit of vengeance or justice — like a human shark, or a deadly weapon with the safety catch removed. Through it all, Neeson remains a great actor, someone who seeks to understand the soul of such violent men, and that sets his projects apart from the countless other “Taken” knockoffs produced each year. His movies make money, and in turn, Neeson makes more movies, each one a lot like the last, to the extent that audiences reasonably know what to expect. “Memory” may surprise them — provided they’ve forgotten the movie on which it’s based, that is, since the twisty plot felt fresher in its earlier incarnation.

Popular on Variety

Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a hit man who is very good at his job. We recognize this because Alex is pushing 70 and still getting the jump on men half his age. We recognize this too because hit men so often wind up being hunted and killed by other hit men in such movies, or else moving to a Caribbean island with a bag of diamonds — but “Memory” doesn’t feel like that kind of movie. Alex is slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, which means retirement isn’t likely to be so glamorous. We recognize this when, after completing his first job, he misplaces the key to his getaway vehicle. We recognize this too when he rolls up his sleeve and we see all the key details scribbled there in black marker.

At this point, audiences will no doubt remember another movie, Christopher Nolan’s backsliding puzzle-box thriller “Memento,” so it’s a bit surprising when the film introduces none other than that film’s star, Guy Pearce, as the FBI agent whose investigation into a sordid sex trafficking ring puts him on a collision course with Neeson’s character. Relatively early in the film, Campbell shows the two men sitting in neighboring cars, unaware of one another’s existence. They are driving to the same place: a safe house where Vincent Serra (Pearce) is trying to protect a teenage girl who’s meant to be a key witness in his case. Alex has been sent there to kill her.

Alex gets as far as the girl’s bedroom before deciding not to pull the trigger. But the decision is much deeper than that. In refusing to fulfill the assignment, he’s signing his own death warrant. He will be hunted by other hit men, and he will take as many of the bad guys with him before he goes as possible. Alex knows he’s no hero, but there are worse people than him in the world, and “Memory” becomes a kind of brutal cleanup exercise in which he can achieve what law enforcement can’t. Typically, he’s the tool people call to snuff the star witness before the trial. Now, he’s the one who can step in when the police move too slow. For this to work, Alex and Vincent must make a sort of uneasy arrangement, and audiences must accept that the entire justice system is broken.

Alex’s employer, it turns out, is a powerful Texas millionaire, embodied by Monica Bellucci as a woman who once was beautiful and now is obsessed with trying to prolong her own life. Her character is complicit in an underage sex ring, the likes of which righteous QAnon followers are so adamant lurks in the shadows of American society. Maybe it does. In “Memory,” Neeson could be their very own action hero, working his way up the chain until he’s dismantled the whole operation.

There’s less action here than you might assume. Campbell’s directing style is typically energetic, shot with a muscular moving camera. But when the violence comes, it’s sudden, unexpected and irreversible. At one point, Alex makes a car blow up, and Campbell shows the explosions from miles away, a tiny flash of fire all but lost in a wide shot of El Paso. Later, Alex kills a man at the gym, and the murder goes unseen and unheard by the woman working out in the foreground.

In the end, “Memory” isn’t terribly convincing, but it’s at least trying for something more serious than most. Released earlier this year, thematically similar “Catch the Fair One” was a far better movie. But it didn’t star Liam Neeson. And if that’s a prerequisite when picking such films, you could certainly do worse than “Memory.”

Reviewed online, April 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 114 MIN.

• Production: A Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films release of a Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films, Black Bear Pictures presentation of a Welle Entertainment production, in association with Saville Prods., Arthur Sarkissian production. Producers: Cathy Shulman, Moshe Diamant, Rupert Maconick, Michael Heimler, Arthur Sarkissian. Executive producers: Teddy Schwarzman, Ben Stillman, Peter Bouckaert, Rudy Durand, Tom Ortenberg, James Masciello, Matthew Sidari.
• Crew: Director: Martin Campbell. Screenplay: Dario Scardapane, based on the picture "De Zaak Alzheimer" by Carl Joos, Erik Van Looy. Camera: David Tattersall. Editor: Jo Francis. Music: Rupert Parkes.
• With: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Harold Torres.

More from Variety

Donald trump joins tiktok, app he had tried to ban as president citing ‘credible’ threat to u.s. national security, what netflix learned from ‘fallout’ success apparent in new synced-up games & unscripted strategy, tiktok star sabrina brier to release audiobook ‘that friend’ in 2025 (exclusive), lip-sync dubbing beta tests begin in hollywood, more from our brands, ariana grande declares ‘the boy is mine’ on ‘fallon,’ confirms penn badgley will star in video, can italy’s lake garda finally compete with como—or will it become a victim of its own success, adam silver is sorry for lengthy nba media negotiations, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, get 7-day max free trial — binge hacks, house of the dragon season 1 and more, verify it's you, please log in.

Filed under:

Liam Neeson’s Taken era is memorable, but his new revenge film Memory isn’t

It’s the beginning of the end for one of Neeson’s particular set of skills

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Liam Neeson’s Taken era is memorable, but his new revenge film Memory isn’t

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how long a shadow Taken has cast. It’s been 14 years since director Pierre Morel redefined Liam Neeson’s place in cinema with his 2008 film, which cast the dramatic actor against type as an ex-CIA operative and combat powerhouse. Since then, too many action films starring Neeson have followed the steps of a familiar dance. His peaceful domestic life is shattered when something is taken from him: His daughter is kidnapped ( Taken ), and so is his ex-wife ( Taken 2 ), who’s then murdered in Taken 3 . Or his son is murdered ( Cold Pursuit ), he loses his job ( The Commuter ), or his family moves on without him ( Unknown ). In each case, a long-buried history of clinically effective violence is unearthed, and for about two hours, Neeson makes the criminal element sorry they ever thought picking on a guy in his 60s would be easy. Memory is the latest of these films, and at first, it seems like it’s capable of subverting the formula. Then it slowly settles into tired mimicry.

Memory begins with a slight inversion of the Neeson Action Formula: This time, he’s one of the bad guys, kind of. Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a world-class assassin who takes jobs from some of the worst people in the world. When he’s asked to do the one thing you never ask an action hero to do — kill a kid — Neeson turns on his employers. As he becomes a vigilante determined to make them pay, he’s hunted by both sides, with criminals and law enforcement coming at him along the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. His chief pursuer: FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), who’s after the same guys Alex is.

Memory ’s big swerve is that Alex is in a race against time. His health is deteriorating, and he’s suffering from memory loss, a harbinger of severe cognitive decline to come. This means he isn’t just out to punish a crime syndicate for crossing a line; he’s trying to symbolically atone for a life of ill-gotten gains while he’s still capable of taking meaningful action.

On its own, Memory is a tepid thriller, competently made. Journeyman director Martin Campbell has reliably delivered exciting action sequences in films running the gamut from extraordinary (the 2006 James Bond reboot Casino Royale ) to surprising (Jackie Chan’s 2017 Taken riff The Foreigner ) to forgettable (2021’s Maggie Q vehicle The Protégé ). In terms of the actual action, Memory is firmly a lesser work from Campbell, who seems more interested this time around in ineffective melodrama than in physical conflict. The promise of any Liam Neeson action movie is Liam Neeson committing startling acts of brutality, but Memory follows Alex around as he threatens a lot of people with violence while only occasionally committing any.

Neeson reads as if he’s operating in the same mode of desperate competence he originally perfected in Taken . Yet in Memory , the thrill is gone — his intensity is no longer surprising, and as committed as Neeson is to remaining on screen and present for most of his character’s stunts, his limitations appear more apparent than usual, given Campbell’s clear shot blocking and the clean cuts that stitch the film’s action scenes together so neatly. Arguably, the film suffers from these two men being too good at their jobs, so one’s commitment overexposes the others’ shortcomings.

More compelling is Guy Pearce’s weary Agent Serra, who at times serves as the de facto protagonist when Memory ’s script demands that Alex disappear for a while. Serra’s investigation into Alex’s criminal employers is the one place where Memory makes anything approaching a compelling statement, even if it’s a shopworn one about the institution of law enforcement and the ways it’s used to enforce the status quo more than to find justice.

Memory ’s most fascinating aspect ultimately lies outside of the film itself, if it’s read as a meta-commentary on Neeson’s action oeuvre. As Alex, Neeson is portraying a man who knows he can’t continue being the kind of person Neeson has played across so many movies. The film plays better — but only slightly — if viewers consider the comments Neeson made in early 2021 about being ready to retire from this kind of film after only a few more (presumably Memory and his forthcoming thriller Retribution ) .

In many of these films, Neeson has been an unlikely avatar for white upper-class male rage. The appeal of his late-career turn as an action star is a direct result of the dissonance between his well-mannered demeanor and the violence these characters commit. His sonorous voice — which has led to a long voice-acting career and frequent casting in mentor-type roles — doesn’t belie the brutality these characters all eventually give way to. Under this reading, Neeson’s action movies are about the order whiteness and wealth has imposed on the world, the male sense of entitlement to that order, and the violence lurking beneath it, aimed at anyone who tries to disrupt it. It started with a film called Taken , and it’s no coincidence that most of these films are incited by a man feeling robbed.

This is curious, because these films are never about the theft of possessions — they’re about losing other people and losing status. The lives of his many characters’ loved ones are on the line, but often so is the sense of possession and control these men felt over their lives. They all have a sense of ownership extending over their family members, their jobs, and their right to cut out the middleman of law enforcement and kill people.

Memory is not Liam Neeson’s final action film, and it won’t be the one that defines him. But it’s worth considering as his tenure of mannered cinematic vengeance slowly comes to a close. In this case, it’s with a character suddenly attempting to atone for the man he’s been, right before his own history evaporates from his mind. It isn’t terribly convincing — even though Alex Lewis confesses that he’s been a bad guy, Memory is still built around the thrill of seeing that bad guy unleashed. There is little that suggests Alex Lewis is all that different from Bryan in the Taken movies, or any of Neeson’s other violent avatars. It’s worth remembering this era of cinema, and everything it says about specifically male fantasies and male rage. But it isn’t necessarily worth remembering Memory itself.

Memory opens in theaters on April 29.

Liam Neeson does his best to make his latest film, 'Memory,' memorable. Guy Pearce helps

At first glance “Memory” seems like another Liam Neeson movie where his character has  a particular set of skills — ones that involve killing people, mostly.

Actually, it is that, but it’s also something different, and something more. Usually, Neeson plays a Good Man Pushed Too Far who has to go kill a bunch of commandos or whatever who have kidnapped a family member.

But this time he’s the bad guy. Kind of. A good bad guy. Good-ish. He plays Alex Lewis, a contract killer who is exceptionally good at his job (see particular set of skills, above). We learn this early on in a graphic display of his talents, the kind of scene that makes you squirm and groan out loud.

Some of us, anyway.

Liam Neeson is a killer with a moral code

But there’s a curveball in the story, which is based on the 2003 Belgian film “The Memory of a Killer.” Alex has memory loss, and is in what at first seems like early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (his brother lives in a care home with the same diagnosis). He’s starting to get a little sloppy, unable to remember the kind of details that keep you from getting caught or, worse, killed. Medication helps some at the moment but he knows which direction this is heading.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

He tries to turn down one of those one last job gigs but ends up getting roped into it anyway. But it’s a two-person hit, and part of the deal requires something that will violate the moral code we didn’t know he had till now. But it does, and of course the people who hired him are not happy about that.

Once he learns what’s really going on — really ugly stuff involving undocumented children — Alex decides to take on the entire operation in violent acts of vengeance. This gets messy because the whole thing has tentacles that reach into the power centers of El Paso, Texas, which also happens to be his hometown. 

Meanwhile, Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), an FBI agent, is trying to figure out who is killing all these people. He’s assisted by Linda Amistead (Taj Atwal), another FBI agent, and a Mexican officer, Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres). They’re not getting much help, either from local law enforcement or the feds.

At the center of things is Davana Sealman (Monica Bellucci), a real-estate titan in El Paso with some quirky ideas about aging. But it’s more complex than just that.

The characters are the most important thing here

Still, this isn’t a whodunit, because we know who’s doing it — Alex is. Vincent wants to catch him, of course, but the scales of justice don’t really seem to be tipping in the good guys’ favor.

What becomes important, then, are the character studies. It’s nice to see Neeson stretch more than he does in some of these kinds of films. It’s not exactly art-house fare, but Neeson in the right project is an outstanding actor. And it’s intriguing to see him straddle the line between good and evil, although how good someone who has spent his life killing people for money can be is a legitimate question.

It’s also interesting to see Pearce in another film about memory loss — he starred in one of the best, after all, “Memento.” He goes a little heavy on the down-home Texas accent, but he always does good work, so it’s not surprising that the best scenes are the ones in which he and Neeson interact.

Bellucci’s role is odd enough to merit attention but it’s not much more than that, which leaves her with less to do. The other characters are just stock portrayals, so much so they become almost cliche.

That’s too bad. “Memory” is a good-enough movie that could have been a lot better. Neeson is to thank for most of the good. Turns out he, like his characters, does have a particular set of skills. They involve acting.

'Memory' 3 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci.

Rating:  Rated R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout.

Note: In theaters April 29.

Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected] . Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm . Twitter: @goodyk . Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter .

Subscribe to azcentral.com today . What are you waiting for?

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Memory (2022)

July 5, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Memory , 2022.

Directed by Martin Campbell. Starring Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Taj Atwal, Harold Torres, Monica Bellucci. Ray Stevenson, Stella Stocker, Antonio Jaramillo, Ray Fearon, Lee Boardman, Rebecca Calder, Natalie Anderson, Atanas Srebrev, Scot Williams, Sigal Diamant, Doug Rao, Daniel De Bourg, Mia Sanchez, J.R. Esposito, and Kalina Stancheva.

An assassin-for-hire finds that he’s become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization.

When it comes to his recent onslaught of disposable and interchangeable action fare, it’s been so long since Liam Neeson has worked with a notable director skilled in style and propulsive momentum that watching his performance here in Martin Campbell’s ( Casino Royale , last year’s surprisingly fun The Protege , and many more) Memory (which is a remake of Belgium’s The Alzheimer’s Case , adapted from the novel of the same name by Jef Geeraerts), it almost feels like a resurgence inside a late-career genre that he had seemingly worn out his welcome. That doesn’t mean there’s anything new here or that the movie is good, but it’s a welcome jolt to see Liam Neeson busting heads while also delivering a performance that suggests he’s awake and cares.

Working as a contract killer, Alex Lewis, like practically every Liam Neeson character of the past 15 years, is thinking about getting out of the game and retiring. Of course, after watching Liam Neeson perform a similar routine countless times, we know there is no easy escape. However, a spin gives Memory a different feel from those other experiences, which is the protagonist suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Still equipped with the usual hand-to-hand combat proficiency and firearm precision, Alex slowly unravels mentally over the story, often forgetting crucial details related to guns and evidence imperative to bringing the real villains to justice. There are quite a few instances depicting a physically and mentally vulnerable Liam Neeson, which wisely prevents Memory from fully functioning as a story where the geriatric hero saves the day. Refreshingly, the story is less about Liam Neeson’s protagonist and more about injustice and the legal system’s failings.

This is partially because Memory also boasts an impressive ensemble, following Guy Pearce as FBI agent Vincent Serra, Monica Belushi as despicable CEO Davana Sealman, a shady detective played by Ray Stevenson, and more criminal investigators played by Taj Atwal and Harold Torres, somewhat rounding things out. While Alex is taking care of his business, Vincent goes undercover, infiltrating the home of a father (Antonio Jaramillo) nonchalantly and grossly pimping out his teenage daughter Beatriz (Mia Sanchez) brainwashing the poor girl into believing that it’s a necessity for pursuing the American Dream. Things quickly go south, leaving the father dead and the daughter, who has no interest in testifying, detained and about to be deported, at least before Vincent steps in and gets her placed inside a group home.

For reasons that will become clear as Memory unspools, one of Alex’s upcoming targets happens to be the traumatized girl, with him naturally drawing a line with his superiors. It also turns out that some of his other contracts have also been related to a greater cover-up that essentially all comes back to people that have ties to Beatriz. Without spoiling too much, Alex also has a hazy recollection of certain events, designated a person of interest in this complicated spiderweb. Simultaneously, the legal system laughably fails at processing child abusers, which sets Alex on a tear killing his team and anyone else involved with the whole disturbing affair, essentially taunting them by leaving breadcrumbs, implying that they are too slow and incompetent at delivering justice. To the film’s credit, some of these fight sequences are pleasantly brutal, with sadistic mean-streak direction from Martin Campbell that ensures no happy ending will be.

As one can see, there is a lot of plot in Memory and several other characters there simply isn’t time to touch on. It’s all but clear that this narrative was born from a novel, as many intriguing characters feel underdeveloped, ranging from heroes deeply rooted in this case to villains. Occasionally, Memory is mildly confusing messiness, although Dario Scardapane’s script solidly peppers in lines of dialogue, succinctly summing things up.

Unfortunately, the Alzheimer’s aspect doesn’t come into play until the third act, so much of the film feels like the traditional Liam Neeson murder-fest but jacked up on intensity and viciousness. A better film would probably allow Liam Neeson to flex his dramatic side (primarily present in the last 30 minutes or so) more, but Martin Campbell is either sticking to the source material or more interested in letting Liam Neeson do his head-splitting thing. There is also something slightly offputting regarding the story’s central message, which is that murder is a necessity because even the vilest scum imaginable will walk away clean.

Memory is also a bit too scattershot and all over the place that it’s hard to completely invest in this otherwise dark and compelling tale. Ironically, it turns out that Liam Neeson is the best part of a film that does have more on its mind than giving the Irish brute his typical revenge motives. It shouldn’t be that way, though; as a whole, the story comes up short.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

When Movie Artwork Was Great

The Most Shocking Movies of the 1970s

Maximum Van Dammage: The Definitive Top 10 Jean-Claude Van Damme Movies!

Essential Forgotten Films Well Worth Seeking Out

Peeping Tom: A Voyeuristic Masterpiece of the Slasher Subgenre

Cobra: Sylvester Stallone and Cannon Films Do Dirty Harry

Godzilla at 10: The Movie That Launched the MonsterVerse Revisited

10 Badass Action Movies You May Have Missed

The Essential Movies About Memory

15 Great Feel-Good Sing-a-Long Movies

• Comic Books
• Video Games
• Toys & Collectibles
• Articles and Opinions
• About Flickering Myth
• Write for Flickering Myth
• Advertise on Flickering Myth
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

• April 29, 2022
• Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis; Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra; Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman; Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora; Ray Fearon as Special Agent Gerald Nussbaum

Home Release Date

• June 21, 2022
• Martin Campbell

Distributor

• Briarcliff Entertainment

Movie Review

Where did he put the keys? They should be here under the windshield visor. That’s where he always leaves them. He wouldn’t have taken them into the hospital with him. Would he? No, no. That would be crazy. Sloppy. Bad, bad, bad.

They’re not on the seat. Not in his pants pocket. In his shirt! Yes, he put them in his scrubs’ top pocket. That’s right, he was masquerading as an orderly this time. Hospital. Scrubs. Right.

He almost forced himself to retrace his steps back through the lobby and into the room where he garroted his mark’s throat. Blood everywhere. People walking by. Bad. That would have been an amateur mistake. He never makes those. Or … he didn’t.

But things are getting worse.

Alex Lewis has long known that the decline would happen. Alzheimer’s disease has hit his whole family this way. His older brother is little more than an empty … uh, just empty at this point. For Alex, it’s only been little things: a key, a picture, a word, a note. That’s why he’s taken to writing instructions and reminders on his own arm. But for some jobs, like Alex’s, you can’t be plagued with memory loss or the threat of a rubbed-off message.

Killers can’t be losing track of things. Not even keys. In this line of work, it won’t get you fired. It’ll get you dead.

He even tried to quit. But his handler talked him out of it. “Men like us, don’t retire,” he told Alex. But what do you do when you can’t remember the address, the name, the … thingamajig any longer? What then?

Just one more job. Make it a big one. And then he’ll have enough cash to hide himself away somewhere, maybe. He’ll have to leave what’s left of his brother behind. But, hey, soon enough he’ll probably forget him anyway.

Just one last, uh … whatchamacallit. Then he’ll be fine.[ Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections. ]

Positive Elements

Alex’s next job changes everything, as he’s called upon to kill a teen girl who had been dragged into child prostitution by sex trafficking ring. Obviously, that’s not good. Alex, however, can’t force himself to follow through. But the girl is brutally murdered anyway by someone else. Alex, feeling that he’s close to losing everything anyway, takes it upon himself to hunt down those calling the shots. He also helps an FBI agent named Vincent Serra. Vincent had gone out of his way to help protect the abused girl—who was left homeless after a police sting went wrong.

Both men attempt to bring the powerbrokers behind the much larger trafficking operation to justice. Of course, their methods for doing so are much different. “We all have to die, Vincent. What’s important is what we do before we go,” Alex tells the FBI agent.

Amid a tainted justice system, we see very few good men and women. Vincent is one of a rare breed here.

Spiritual Elements

A Mexican detective wears six St. Mary medals around his neck to remind him of abused and murdered young women that he’s encountered in the course of a human trafficking case.

Someone says a prayer in Spanish and ends it with an affirmative “Amen.”

Sexual Content

We see several different women wearing open shirts or low-cut tops. One of them is in a formfitting swimsuit. Part of Vincent’s investigation into a sexual trafficking ring involves him paying, supposedly, to have sex with a man’s teen daughter. The girl undresses to a lightweight shift, but then discovers that Vincent is wearing a wire when she pulls open his shirt.

Later we see snapshots of that same teen girl being slapped by her father and a short video of her being tossed onto a bed by a shirtless older man. Later still, we see that same man at a yacht party. He strips off his clothes and lays face down on a bed and orders a different teen girl to get undressed. (She’s stopped from doing so.) The party also features an onboard hot tub packed with young women in bikinis.

A wife suspects her husband of an affair and demands he wash off the woman’s perfume. A woman openly flirts with Alex at a bar and later—after Alex slaps down a drunken man rudely hitting on her—the two end up in bed together. We see her in a cleavage-baring slip the next morning.

Violent Content

There’s quite a bit of brawling and death-dealing in this R-rated pic. Alex pounds away at several men in and out of the course of his job. He also breaks a man’s nose with a rifle butt. He batters another guy in a public restroom, smashing the man through a porcelain toilet. He slaps a drunk around at a hotel bar, slamming his head into the bar.

In another scene, Alex beats a killer mercilessly, slamming the man’s head and face into a car mirror and through a window. He then ties the bloodied man into the car and detonates a bomb on the vehicle’s undercarriage. We see him shoot several people in the head, up close and at a distance. He rips open a man’s gushing neck with a wire garrote.

In turn, Alex is also beaten badly by an angry police officer in a police interview. And the guy notes that he’ll take all afternoon to beat a confession out of him.

We’re shown pictures of two young boys with bruises all over their backs. A young girl is battered. We see her later with a bloody bullet hole in her forehead. A woman’s throat is slashed open by a man behind her, and the camera watches her bleed out. An innocent woman is shot in the throat by a gunman. Alex is shot in the side at one point and his shirt soon becomes soaked with blood. He opens his shirt, revealing the wound, then pours vodka on it and lights it afire to cauterize the laceration.

Someone tells a story about his wife getting hit by a drunk driver who then backs up to kill her son so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. A police sniper kills an innocent man. A man is riddled with bullets from police fire. Vincent tumbles out a second story window with an armed man who dies in the fall.

Crude or Profane Language

Some 40 f-words and a dozen s-words are joined by multiple uses of “a–hole” and “h—.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused seven times total (with God’s name being combined with “d–n” once).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Both Alex and Vincent drink pretty heavily in several separate scenes. We see others drinking champagne, wine and booze at bars and at a yacht party. Vincent and a fellow female agent get drunk at a bar. A man and woman drink shots of tequila. A murder victim’s wife is visibly drunk during a police interview.

Two different guys smoke cigarettes.

Alex regularly takes a prescription medication designed to help his Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. A wealthy woman receives injections of a drug from her private physician. And a doctor moves to give someone a lethal injection before he’s stopped. We’re told of a man who was high on meth.

Other Negative Elements

This film declares that criminal organizations have corrupted many in the high seats of power in the U.S. criminal justice system (and in Washington, D.C.). We see several different people in authority corrupted by money and promises of power. And in the end, it’s suggested that murder may be the only way to solve that systemic disease.

Some might winkingly say that Liam Neeson is yet again playing a hero who has something, ahem, taken from him: this time his memory.

But that’s not accurate, really. In part, that’s because Neeson initially plays a true villain here, albeit someone with a conscience that’s starting to awaken. So when he’s not killing people in the film Memory, he’s straining to give heavy handed aid to the real hero before he loses himself to Alzheimer’s.

We’re shown child sex trafficking and gory murder in a crime-riddled world rotted to the core by graft and power. And it’s all part and parcel of a badly broken and horribly corrupted U.S. justice system.

Does that make for a stark social commentary? Maybe. But it also leaves you stewing in a fairly dark worldview. And no amount of orange soda and Gummy bears will make that depressing and often foul viewpoint any sweeter.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

Latest Reviews

The Watchers

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

Review: Liam Neeson out for revenge? ‘Memory’ makes you want to forget about it

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Back in 2001, Guy Pearce starred in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” a film about a man tracking down his wife’s killer while suffering from memory loss, using notes and tattoos on his body to remember clues in his search. In 2022, Pearce is co-starring in a film in which a contract killer who has early-onset Alzheimer’s uses similar methods in order to keep track of details. But that’s where the comparisons between “Memento” and Martin Campbell’s “Memory” end. The former was a groundbreaking neo-noir classic; the latter is best forgotten as soon as possible.

“Memory” is yet another entry in the Liam Neeson Gets Revenge subgenre, a sprawling body of work that sprang from the surprise success of the 2008 action-thriller “Taken.” You know the drill: A child or some other vulnerable person is threatened, Neeson’s character has got a very particular set of skills, rescue and/or vengeance ensues. That’s at least one of the plots of “Memory,” a tangled mess of intertwining storylines and two-dimensional characters.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

“Memory” is a remake of a 2003 Belgian crime thriller, “De zaak Alzheimer,” based on the book by Jef Geeraerts. Dario Scardapane adapted the screenplay, which is fairly faithful to the original. Neeson plays Alex Lewis, the aforementioned assassin with Alzheimer’s, who’s getting out of the game after one last gig. When he discovers one of his intended victims is a teenage girl, a victim of sex trafficking by her father (who was accidentally killed in an FBI raid), Alex not only backs out, he decides to go after everyone who hired him to kill the girl in the first place.

Simultaneously, the film follows the FBI agent from the raid, Vincent Serra (Pearce), who now feels guilty about killing the girl’s father and leaving her stuck in a detention center, about to be deported to Mexico. But Vincent’s got a lot more on his plate, as Alex the assassin starts stacking bodies around El Paso, working his way up a sex-trafficking food chain that leads to the top of a Texas corporate real estate firm, headed by (checks notes) Monica Bellucci ?! She’s playing a mogul named Davana Sealman, who hired Alex through a middleman to cover up evidence of her terrible son’s wrongdoings.

“Memory” has a decent director in Campbell (“Casino Royale,” “Vertical Limit”) and a great cast (yes, that’s Ray Stevenson as a corrupt cop), but a crippling case of a bad script that can’t manage to make us care about any of these characters. The plot zigs and zags between Alex’s convoluted quest, Vincent and his motley crew of FBI investigators, and this corporate elite real estate trafficking ring, but doesn’t take the time to tell us who these people are, what they want or why they’re doing any of this.

The original Belgian film made high-ranking government officials the villains, but wealthy businesspeople as powerful and depraved sexual predators is much more American, and the mother/son conspiracy calls to mind the terrible twosome of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Not that “Memory” intends any particularly trenchant social commentary such as this. The ugly digital cinematography and flat screenplay make this feel more like a very long episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” but you’d be more entertained checking out that long-running TV procedural than this film.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

In English and Spanish with English subtitles Rating: R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes Playing: Starts April 29 in general release

More to Read

Jeremy Renner joins ‘Knives Out 3’ in first film since near-fatal accident

May 30, 2024

Review: ‘In the Land of Saints and Sinners,’ where Liam Neeson once again has his vengeance

March 30, 2024

Review: Vicious ‘Dogman’ shows a director known for excess at his most unmuzzled

March 29, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

M. Emmet Walsh, memorable ‘Blood Simple’ and ‘Blade Runner’ character actor, dies at 88

March 20, 2024

Review: A hitman’s memory fades in ‘Knox Goes Away,’ a thriller that’s too placid from the start

March 15, 2024

Live action shorts: Stories of life, death and the quirkiest of in-betweens

Feb. 19, 2024

Chilean doc Eternal Memory reminds true love endures even after recollections fade

Feb. 14, 2024

Nicolas Cage, Kristoffer Borgli and the interpretation of ‘Dream’

Jan. 2, 2024

Review: In ‘Memory,’ two survivors come to a wary bond, even if the past harbors demons

Dec. 22, 2023

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: Charming and disarming, ‘Hit Man’ overcomes its own identity crisis

June 6, 2024

‘Robot Dreams’ raids real-life memories for depth. Its director is new to animation

Real or not real? New ‘Hunger Games’ book, movie prequel will tell Haymitch’s story

We’ve been telling the wrong story about queer people in Hollywood

Memory Review: Liam Neeson Exacts Vengeance for Exploited Girls

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Netflix's New Shark Movie Sinks Godzilla Despite Biting Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes Audiences

Dolly parton wants to join jennifer aniston's 9 to 5 remake, but lily tomlin feels rejected by it, tom hardy dishes on venom: the last dance, sequel could be rated-r.

Liam Neeson shreds repugnant human traffickers in a convoluted actioner with a sadly newsworthy narrative. Based on a Belgian novel and previous film adaptation, Memory follows a hit man with early-onset Alzheimer's disease exacting vengeance for exploited girls. The film follows a trail of bullets and bodies across the border from Mexico to Texas. An overelaborate plot gets lost in the weeds but delivers knockout blows. Baddies get their comeuppance from a man with nothing to lose. A good supporting performance from Guy Pearce adds dramatic heft when the plot meanders.

Memory opens in Guadalajara, Mexico. Alex Lewis (Neeson) dispatches a cartel target with ruthless efficiency. His repertoire of violence has an assortment of brutal methods. Alex's calm escape has a momentary hitch. He gets lost in a fog of uncertainty. Alex writes down key details on his forearm to stay on track. He tells his handler, Mauricio (Lee Boardman), that was the last job.

In El Paso, Texas, FBI agent Vincent Serra (Pearce) leads a raid on a Mexican trafficker (Antonio Jaramillo). A teenage girl (Mia Sanchez) is rescued in the botched operation. Months of surveillance are wasted. Vincent's furious boss (Ray Fearon) wants to shut down their task force. Vincent's Mexican counterpart, Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres), doesn't understand why they are giving up. Back in Guadalajara, Mauricio convinces Alex to stick around for a big payday. Several contracts have been ordered by a powerful real estate mogul (Monica Bellucci).

Facing a Moral Dilemma

Memory's premise has a ruthless killer facing a moral dilemma. Alex has a line that cannot be crossed . The film explains the foundation for his boundary. This ethical stand connects Alex to Vincent. They are on opposite sides of the law but share a common goal. The difference is that Alex has no restraints. As Vincent and Hugo deal with bureaucracy, Alex delivers deadly justice with a grim satisfaction. The unspoken alliance between adversaries gets muddied as casualties rise.

Related: The Aviary Review: No Escape From Twisted Mind Games

Memory gets bogged down by too many trivial characters. The primary storyline is compelling. The film harnesses anger and rage against those willing to abuse the innocent. Memory loses steam when the protagonists bounce back and forth in wasted subplots. For example, Alex has several encounters with an escort (Stella Stocker) in scenes that show him being tough, valiant, and needing emotional support. That's good exposition if those aspects of his personality weren't already seen. It's an unnecessary redundancy that slows down the pacing. There's no need to constantly reinforce what we already know about the characters.

Well Done Fight Scenes

Director Martin Campbell ( GoldenEye , The Foreigner ) is an action master with decades of blockbusters under his belt. He gives Liam Neeson realistic lethality. Alex is not a man in his prime. There's no fluff to his beat-downs. He's not spraying gunfire like a garden hose. Alex moves with a swift purpose and the fight scenes are jarring and well-done. I also got a kick out of Campbell referencing Memento, a Guy Pearce revenge classic where an amnesiac character uses tattoos and body notes to remember.

Memory should have been pared down to sharpen its focus. Monica Bellucci mystifies as the antagonist. Her motivations make no sense whatsoever. Memory has its flaws but works as an action film with a message. It shines a glaring spotlight on femicide in Mexico. Every day has tragic headlines of missing women and girls found dead. This abhorrent plague of trafficking and murder has to stop.

Memory is a production of Bear Pictures, Welle Entertainment, and Saville Productions. It will be released theatrically on April 29th from Briarcliff Entertainment and Open Road Films.

• Movie and TV Reviews
• Liam Neeson

Thanks For Rating

Reminder successfully set, select a city.

• Nashik Times
• Aurangabad Times
• Badlapur Times

You can change your city from here. We serve personalized stories based on the selected city

• Edit Profile
• Briefs Movies TV Web Series Lifestyle Trending Medithon Visual Stories Music Events Videos Theatre Photos Gaming

Arjan Bajwa on Chirag Paswan’s victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections: He has always maintained his composure, grit..- Exclusive

Ranbir Kapoor is a beast in new workout video, proud wife Alia Bhatt REACTS! video inside

Fiona Harvey who inspired 'Baby Reindeer' sues Netflix; seeks $170 Million in damages

BLACKPINK's Lisa teases long-awaited new music three years post solo debut

Prabhas’ Kalki 2898 AD mints over Rs 1 crore in advance booking in just one day

'Munjya' advance box office: Sharvari Wagh, Mona Singh starrer expected to earn Rs 1.5 crore on Day 1, releasing in 1600 screens

• Movie Reviews

Movie Listings

Bajrang Aur Ali

Return Ticket

Chhota Bheem And The C...

Mr. & Mrs. Mahi

Barah x Barah

Marathi Actresses Who Stunned In Pink Outfits

Priyanka Arul Mohan describes her summer 2024 as good vibes and tan lines!

Nayanthara to Aditi Rao Hydari, best photos of the week

Kajal Aggarwal radiates in a yellow saree

Taapsee Pannu redefines style with chic solid sarees

10 Stunning ethnic looks of Aishwarya Dutta

Enchanting pics of Reba John

Janhvi Kapoor’s burnt orange ensemble is a fashionable treat on a hot summer day

Steal-worthy summer looks ft. Jasmine Bhasin

Dazzling clicks of Darsha Gupta

Dedh Bigha Zameen

Chhota Bheem And The Cu...

House Of Lies

Bujji At Anupatti

Pagalariyaan

Konjam Pesinaal Yenna

Padikkadha Pakkangal

Bhaje Vaayu Vegam

Gam Gam Ganesha

Gangs Of Godavari

Aa Okkati Adakku

Prasanna Vadanam

Paarijatha Parvam

Gaganachari

CID Ramachandran Retd. ...

Sureshanteyum Sumalatha...

Guruvayoorambala Nadayi...

Marivillin Gopurangal

Avatara Purusha 2

Chow Chow Bath

Hide And Seek

Somu Sound Engineer

Nayan Rahasya

Bonbibi: Widows Of The ...

Pariah Volume 1: Every ...

Shri Swapankumarer Bada...

Shinda Shinda No Papa

Sarabha: Cry For Freedo...

Zindagi Zindabaad

Maujaan Hi Maujaan

Chidiyan Da Chamba

White Punjab

Any How Mitti Pao

Gaddi Jaandi Ae Chalaan...

Buhe Bariyan

Swargandharva Sudhir Ph...

Naach Ga Ghuma

Juna Furniture

Alibaba Aani Chalishita...

Aata Vel Zaali

Shivrayancha Chhava

Devra Pe Manva Dole

Dil Ta Pagal Hola

Ittaa Kittaa

Jaishree Krishh

Bushirt T-shirt

Shubh Yatra

Your Rating

Write a review (optional).

• Movie Reviews /

Would you like to review this movie?

Cast & Crew

Memory Movie Review : Liam Neeson does what Liam Neeson knows best

• Times Of India

Memory - Official Trailer

Users' Reviews

Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Subhabrata Saha 709 days ago

This movie is absolute trash, a complete disaster, horrible and disgusting. This movie is one of the worst movies in this world. Not at all watchable.

Hardik Trivedi 28 748 days ago

Visual stories.

Entertainment

8 dishes made with leftover mashed potatoes

​Monami Ghosh takes on Kyoto with her charm and grace​

Hina Khan's off-white co-ord set is the new must-have fashion pick

National Donut Day 2024: Why is there a hole in a donut?

Budget honeymoon destinations outside India

​9 Mughal princesses who made a lasting impact on history

News - Memory

Kamal Haasan cherishes memories of SP Balasubrahmanyam ...

BOYNEXTDOOR's debut fan gathering wraps up triumphantly...

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Box Office collection: Chris He...

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Box Office: Chris Hemsworth and...

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Get reviews of the latest theatrical releases every week, right in your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for subscribing.

Please Click Here to subscribe other newsletters that may interest you, and you'll always find stories you want to read in your inbox.

Popular Movie Reviews

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die

Fast Charlie

Jim Henson: Idea Man

The Strangers: Chapter 1

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The A...

The Three Musketeers - Part II...

The Deep Dark