Liam Neeson lives as a walking example of the relentless march of time. It truly waits for no one, but most people don’t have to do action movies well into their golden years. Neeson didn’t really lock down his action rhythm until 2008’s Taken, which defined the rest of his career. He has starred in dozens of similar projects in the intervening 16 years. Most of them, like Blacklight, are terrible wastes of Neeson’s very limited time.
Blacklight comes from director and co-writer Mark Williams. His career teaches us all that you really only have to succeed once. Williams co-created Ozark for Netflix, earning several Emmy nominations for his work. All of his other credits are far less impressive. He pieced together a couple of awful Gerard Butler vehicles. Similarly, he did two movies with Neeson. All of his cinematic entries have unfortunate results.
Liam Neeson Does Very Little to Make Blacklight a Netflix Hit
Blacklight follows Liam Neeson as another identical secret agent man. He still wants to retire and be with his family, but they keep bringing him back. Neeson’s Travis Block is a “fixer” who probably did some impressive things several years ago. Whatever record Block possesses convinces the FBI Director that he needs to help bring in a rogue agent. Block’s new target contacts a journalist to spill the beans on an activist’s recent assassination. Block discovers a conspiracy at the highest levels of the nation’s intelligence infrastructure. The plot features a lot of compelling elements that fit together to form a very boring thriller. A thousand other paranoid conspiracy narratives have handled every beat of the story much better in the past. It’s hard to imagine these details being so dull.
Liam Neeson isn’t the worst part of this film, but he is its most obvious weak point. Neeson has a compelling screen presence and a lot of positive qualities as an actor, but his talents as an action star are leaving him. He keeps doing these bargain bin thrillers for what I have to assume are terrible paychecks. If he’s hurting for money, films that cost $43 million and earned $16 million can’t possibly solve that problem. Neeson still has a dozen irons in the fire. He’s supposed to take the Leslie Nielsen role in an upcoming Naked Gun reboot, but that’s still pending. He did Blacklight in 2022, but he also put out Memory and Marlowe. At least the last of the three felt like a passion project. The following year, he did a movie called Retribution that saw him drive a minivan for 90 minutes.
Blacklight is boring and familiar, but Liam Neeson has done worse. Garbage like this should belong to Steven Seagal. It’s a shame to see such a good actor waste his time. It’s even harder to see him suffer the ravages of time, pushing him out of action stardom. Consider your mortality with Liam Neeson in Blacklight. I can’t see why anyone would choose to do that, but a lot of people evidently already have.
