Memory – Film Review

For fifteen years – ever since he uttered those immortal lines in Taken in 2008 – Liam Neeson has become synonymous with too-old-for-this-crap aging men, dragged into gun feuds with kingpins, probably in some European city. He broods on the Blu Ray cover, staring down at his feet in a long coat with a gun in his hands. You will probably stare at his growing wattle and wonder when he might pack it all in, just before a much-younger starlet hits on him at a bar. 

As someone who grew up with him in films like Krull and Michael Collins, it’s been fascinating to see him become his own sub-genre, much like Jason Statham did about a decade ago, and Bruce Willis has very recently stopped doing. He’s cornered a mid-budget market, and you suspect there are a lot of similarly aged people who rent his movies for a bit of wish-fulfilment. 

Except Memory hits differently. It’s not because it’s any better than Blacklight, The Marksman, The Ice Road, Honest Thief or any of the other movies that we watched yet had to look up on IMDb, simply because we’d forgotten their titles and premises. In fact, it blends into them perfectly. It’s just that Memory feels like an ending, or a beginning of an end. Where before Liam was facing retirement, he’s now facing mortality and infirmities. Memory sees Liam Neeson looking physically creaky, clearly weary, and in a film that embraces death rather than trying to mythologise him in any way.

Liam Neeson has said as much. He has gone on record that he plans to retire from these kinds of movies in two or three films’ time (perhaps returning to movies like Ordinary Love, which he still does so well). And you can see why. Much like Robert De Niro’s infamous old-man fight in The Irishman, Liam Neeson does his own stunts here, but there’s a grunting stiffness to them. The camera cuts away where it can, and rations the amount of exertion he has to do, but it’s clear that Liam is simply getting old. 

In a slight pivot from his usual output, Liam Neeson is on the wrong side of the law. He plays Alex Lewis, a career hitman who is – you guessed it – getting too old for this shit, and is planning to hang up the spurs and retire. There’s room for some chuckles in the opening scenes, as he is undercover as a Mexican, and originally from El Paso: two things that, very clearly, Liam Neeson is not. It’s not quite Sean Connery and the Highlander, but it’s in the same ballpark. 

Meeting up with a childhood friend, Mauricio (Lee Boardman, who continues Memory’s streak of hiring actors who are very definitely not playing characters of their original nationality), Alex agrees to one more job, which is technically a BOGOF, as he has two targets. The first is easy enough, but the second turns out to be a young lady, trafficked to El Paso as a sex worker, which clearly gets Liam’s Taken-impulses firing. 

He refuses to kill the young lady (although, you wonder why her age wasn’t clear in the dossier he was given; clearly Liam is slipping), which triggers the almighty cliche of the hitman gone AWOL, trying to kill those who have bounties on him, before they get to him first. 

This would have all been straight-to-bargain-bin fodder if it wasn’t for a few details. The first is this is directed by Martin Campbell, probably best known for Casino Royale and The Mask of Zorro. He knows his way around a camera (although he is perfectly capable of delivering the odd clunker – Green Lantern included), so there’s a slickness and polish that isn’t often seen in a Neeson Midbuster. Chuck in Monica Bellucci (absolutely phoning it in), Josh Taylor (fresh off the Xbox’s own As Dusk Falls) and Ray Stevenson, and you have a decent cast. 

Luckily, Memory snags Guy Pearce, in full Gary Oldman mode, all greasy hair and late-night stakeouts, and he carries the film completely. He’s Vincent Serra, the cop who is tailing Alex, and his plotline – running in parallel to Alex’s, until it completely takes over in the final third – is by far the standout. It starts inauspiciously, as Vincent’s team are shakily acted and they are motivated by a death that is bizarrely offscreen. It’s so weirdly dismissed that you wonder if it’s on the editing room floor somewhere. But when they get going, the procedural cop stuff is at least mildly interesting, and deals with familiar themes of people in high places getting whatever the hell they want. 

Guy Pearce is great, clearly lacking patience with everyone around him (whether that’s Vincent or Guy showing through, we will likely never know), and he just about manages to carry the attention for the whole movie. Without him, who knows where Memory would be. Absolutely not lodged in our prefrontal cortex, we can tell you.

There’s the whisper of a good idea in the title. This is called Memory because Alex is suffering from Alzheimers, which means he is a hitman who forgets things. In an opening sequence, his car keys aren’t where he believes them to be, and that potential shines for the first half of the movie before being extinguished. The fear of losing one’s memory, and what that means for someone as dangerous as a hitman could have been a real standout motif. Instead, Memory gets bored of the idea and makes Alex as proficient as ever. By the end, it’s just a ticking clock that means he needs to put his mission to bed before he dies. It’s not what we had hoped. 

Still, it creates a lovely reference to one of our favourite movies. Alex writes a lot of the pertinent mission information on his arm in pen, which echoes the fantastic Memento. With Guy Pearce kicking around in the cast, too, we had a nostalgic moment. 

But there’s very little else to recommend Memory. It might become notable in the future as a document: the moment when Liam Neeson retreats from the films that he has become known for. But as a movie, Memory is one towering cliche, with Liam Neeson playing the same role that he’s played for almost two decades, just with visible creaks and with nothing that lodges in the memory at all. 

You can watch Memory from the Film & TV section of the Xbox Store