Producers: Roger Birnbaum, Michael Besman, Warren Goz and Eric Gold   Director: Hans Petter Moland   Screenwriter: Tony Gayton  Cast: Liam Neeson, Yolonda Ross, Frankie Shaw, Daniel Diemer, Javier Molina, Jimmy Gonzales, Josh Drennan, Deanna Nayr Tarraza, Terrence Pulliam and Ron Perlman  Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: C+

Liam Neeson has been in this territory before.  His nameless character, identified in the credits only as Thug, is an ex-boxer working for a Boston mobster, and he’s suffering from memory lapses diagnosed as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the untreatable disorder caused by repeated head injuries.  (As the doctor notes, boxers suffering from it were once referred to as punch-drunk: see “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”)  That situation is not unlike the one faced by Alex Lewis, the character played by Neeson in 2022’s “Memory,” a remake of a Belgian thriller; Lewis was an aging hit-man suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer’s.

In each case the medical reality leads to redemptive choices.  In “Memory,” it was Lewis’ decision to protect a young girl he was commissioned to kill.  Here, Thug tries to reconnect with the family he’d abandoned and rescue a young woman forced into prostitution.  In both movies, however, the characters aim to continue their “work” as well.

Neither film is particularly good, but this one is the better of the two, mainly because Neeson, working again with director Hans Petter Moland, with whom he collaborated on one of his best recent films, “Cold Pursuit,” gives a more soulful performance here.  Under Moland’s guidance Neesom’s Thug comes across as genuinely burnt out, yet capable of volcanic eruptions of anger and violence.  Nonetheless both actor and director are hobbled by the predictability of Tony Gayton’s script, which also fills in too many gaps about Thug’s past with reams of dry narration Neeson has to deliver in voiceover.

When he’s introduced Thug is obviously a tired man, but still loyally serving Charlie Conner (Ron Perlman), his long-time boss.  In fact, Conner has charged him with introducing his son Kyle (Daniel Diemer) to the practicalities of his operations, specifically by accompanying the smug, cocky kid on a job transporting a shipment to the city for drug lord Gamberro (Javier Molina), who also runs a brothel as a side business.  It’s there that Thug encounters a girl, Araceli (Deanna Nayr Tarraza), whose desperation touches him.

But Thug also links up with an older woman (Yolanda Ross), who pursues him after he punches out a guy manhandling her in a bar.  They get close, but at the same time, haunted by dreams of his father (Josh Drennan), whom he remembers brutally toughening him up, he tries to contact the children he hasn’t seen in years.  He hopes to get contact information on his son from his daughter Daisy (Frankie Shaw), a stripper, but she tells him brusquely that her brother died of an overdose some time ago.  That leads him to try to build a relationship with Daisy, along with her adolescent son Dre (Terrence Pulliam), whom he takes to the gym where he still occasionally serves as a sparring partner for younger fighters.  But he advises the boy, who’s been dropped from a football team for fighting with a teammate, that often it’s better to walk away from confrontation.

As all this is going on, Thug is attacked by three gun-wielding goons while taking a payoff for Conner from a priest (Kris Eivers) who’s in debt to the mobster for reasons undisclosed.  He dispatches them all, but the episode convinces him that the Conners, both father and son, are not to be trusted.  It also moves him to try to make amends by providing for Daisy and Dre, and to buy Araceli from Gamberro.  Things do not go as smoothly as he hopes, however.

Moland stages the convoluted and frankly overplotted business fairly convincingly, aided by a gritty production design by Jørgen Stangebye Larsen while working at a deliberate pace in tandem with cinematographer Philip Øgaard and editor Dino Jonsäter, all to the strains of Kaspar Kaae’s mournful score.  For the most part the Massachusetts locations are nicely employed, but there are lapses.  The attack on Thug, for instance, is staged in the middle of downtown, on a street hemmed in by tall skyscrapers, in broad daylight, yet there’s not another car or pedestrian to be seen anywhere within what seems a two-block radius—a simply ludicrous circumstance, even if it does allow for some beautifully composed images.  And a lengthy dream sequence, in which Thug accompanies his father on a leisurely fishing expedition, strains for a degree of psychological depth a genre picture like this really can’t sustain. 

Still, this story of a bruised man struggling for redemption is itself redeemed to a considerable extent by Neeson’s committed performance, and by strong turns from much of the principal supporting cast.  To be sure, Perlman isn’t really doing much more than his usual gruff shtick, and Diemer’s preening smirk is awfully grating.  But Shaw’s hard-bitten Daisy is convincing, and Pulliam makes Dre an agreeable young man.  By contrast Molina is quite persuasive as a true thug.

“Absolution” is one of the better Liam Neeson vehicles of recent years, but it’s still beneath what we all know he’s capable of.