IN THEATRES: Honest Thief

Professional bank robber Tom Dolan (Liam Neeson) wants to retire to spend the rest of his life with the woman he loves (Kate Walsh). 

He calls up the FBI to confess, but when the agents tasked with interrogating him turn out to be corrupt, he finds himself on the run to clear his name.

Over a decade after Taken, Liam Neeson's run as your dad's action hero has well and truly past the point of being enjoyable. The Commuter is enjoyable hokum, and last year's Cold Pursuit would have been a nice surprise, except for the bitter taste of Neeson's comments on the promotion circuit.

If you are looking for a movie where Neeson growls down a phone and punches people, Honest Thief does contain these things, but will still leave you disappointed.

While Neeson's previous movies in this vein have been modest in scope, Honest Thief feels like a big step down. The person I went with said the first half of the movie felt like a Netflix original. It does feel very televisual, with a clean digital look that negates any sense of atmosphere or environment.

There are only a few locations, and aside from the occasional arial shot, the movie feels small and low-budget. The poverty of resources is brutally laid bare in the film's one explosion, which looks like it was made by the same people behind the visual effects of London Has Fallen.

A small consolation are the cast, made up of fine actors like Kate Walsh, Jeffrey Donovan and Robert Patrick.

Walsh in particular makes for a great co-lead, with a warm, sparky performance that feels far more dimensional than the character on the page. It does help shore up Neeson. He is on auto-pilot for this one - his gruff voice and presence make him watchable as ever, but he plays his role as a distilled version of the archetype he inhabited in Taken - he is old, he is tough and he will do anything to defend his family. 

While he is good at delivering gravitas to the silliest lines, Neeson has never projected anything resembling a sense of humour. 

I used to compare him to the gruff elder statesmen of the action genre, actors like Chuck Bronson and Lee Marvin. But while those guys were taciturn, they had a sense of irony. 

Neeson's gift is earnest investment in the motivation and pain fo his characters - there are no chuckles in Neesonland. In this respect the action hero he resembles the most is Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Honest Thief is not awful, but it is epically banal. Stick with The Commuter.

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