Film Review - Retribution (2023)

Retribution stars Liam Neeson as Matt Turner a man who is taking his young children (Jack Champion and Emily Kusche) to School when a mysterious man rings him and tells him there’s a bomb underneath his car seat and if he doesn’t do exactly as he’s told it will explode so what will he do, what will he do?

Retribution honestly does what it says on the box, its an okay if at times silly thriller but is one of Neeson’s better films he’s made in the last few years, he himself seems more engaged in this material for a start and I also liked seeing Jack Champion again after seeing him as Spider in Avatar: The Way of Water and in Scream 6 earlier this year and the film has some good thrills for the most part and it clocks along nicely at 90 minutes.

But where this falls way down is its ending as it feels like the movie is building to a climax that makes a lot of sense within the story and character framework and there’s a very tense moment near the end of the film but then it goes completely elsewhere and I just sat there going “What the Fuck” and it really undoes a lot of the film for me as I felt it just made no sense to do this when you could’ve done that and that would’ve worked a whole lot better.

And so that was Retribution and its fine save for a dumb ending, 2 out of 5.