by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $5.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Taylor John Smith, Claire van der Boom
Intro:
[Blacklight], even for the dime-a-dozen sub-genre it occupies, is especially misguided.
For the first half of this Melbourne shot action-thriller, Liam Neeson doesn’t seem to be the main character. That ‘honour’ goes to Taylor John Smith (Shadow in the Cloud) as Dusty, an FBI agent who’s discovered a conspiracy with his agency at the centre of it. He handles the spotlight well, and holds his own in the fight scenes.
But then he passes the plot baton to Neeson, and the demarcation is glaring. Every action scene to follow winds up being as disconnected from the aging star as possible. Yeah, he’s once again playing a specialist who gets dragged into a larger scheme because his family ends up being pulled into it, but he’s far less mobile than usual. It’s like this film was always meant to be about Dusty, but then they switched it over because of name-brand recognition.
Not that this film could have been salvaged even if it continued down that Dusty route, as the story and dialogue are positively asinine. Courtesy of writer/director Mark Williams (Honest Thief), it pits Neeson against a government conspiracy that is so vaguely defined, it must’ve cribbed some notes from The Commuter. It tries to bank on modern-day societal paranoia, but ends up so mind-numbing in its obviousness that there’s no bite to it.
To say nothing of the trashy treatment of Neeson’s Travis and his obsessive-compulsive disorder, with his daughter (Aussie actress Claire van der Boom) lambasting him for ‘screwing up’ his granddaughter, who behaves much like he does. Yikes. It doesn’t help that this serves as a foundation for editor Michael P. Shawver’s particularly ugly over-editing flourishes.
Blacklight, even for the dime-a-dozen sub-genre that it occupies, is especially misguided. It’s the latest and greatest example of how Liam Neeson’s pull and ability as an action lead is growing weaker and weaker with each passing year, and the productions around him are becoming increasingly aware of that… and yet continue to milk the cash cow for all it’s worth. It’s just getting sad now.
