Shed a tear for Liam Neeson, the human algorithm. When he first turned to action movies in the Aughts, it seemed like a refreshing new path for an actor most closely associated with his role in Schindler’s List. In Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, he turned in a soulful, melancholy performance, and together with Jaume Collet-Serra, he made a series of exciting pulp B-movies. But Neeson’s persona as an actor is now defined by these roles — although he does from time to time appear in films like Martin Scorsese’s Silence. His career trajectory looks less like a conscious choice and more like the decisions made by many male actors as they pass into late middle age.
Memory held the promise of addressing the contradictions of playing a badass as you grow older. In real life, Neeson will turn 70 in June. Bruce Willis’ recent announcement that he suffers from aphasia, a brain condition that prevents people from speaking and understanding their surroundings, shows the physical vulnerability underlying his choice to spend the past few years acting in the most undemanding bargain-basement VOD fare. At a certain point, the bullets and blood stop being a metaphor.
Hitman Alex (Neeson) lives in El Paso (with Bulgarian settings doubling for the city), where he plans to retire in the last years of life as his dementia becomes a greater problem. His final job uncovers a child prostitution ring run by a rich woman (Monica Bellucci) and her son (Josh Taylor) that traffics Mexican girls detained by ICE. Alex is hired to kill Beatriz, a young Mexican girl, but he refuses the job. Her death at the hands of a less choosy man hits him particularly hard. The case is under investigation from FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), but unbeknownst to Serra, he and Alex are working concurrently. Their paths grow closer despite Alex’s illegal vigilante pursuit.
Journeyman Martin Campbell, who directed several James Bond films, doesn’t bring much to the table here. The concept invokes Christopher Nolan’s Memento — though Memory is a remake of the Belgian thriller The Alzheimer Case, aka The Memory of a Killer, itself adapted from a 1985 book — as does the image of Neeson scrawling reminders to himself in ink on his arm. But Memory avoids any attempt to describe Alex’s mental decline in its style. The dark cinematography and blue/gray lighting are mighty familiar.
Alex can commit violence as much as he wants, because he can claim he doesn’t really know what he’s doing and his illness would ensure that any jail term would be fairly short. But Memory just allows him to express a sadistic streak while denying its perversity. The fluttering pigeons in one scene allude to John Woo, but Campbell doesn’t push into the Hong Kong director’s feel for stylish abstraction.
Memory wants to be a character study as well as an action movie, with something to say about pedophilia and America’s treatment of Mexican immigrants. But its cynicism is transparent. The fact that Alex and his brother were sexually abused by their father is casually thrown out, as a suggestion of a personal motivation behind his quest to take down sex traffickers. The film uses wealth as a synonym for evil and suggests that ICE detention centers are breeding grounds for exploitation of children, but doesn’t call out greater systemic flaws. While the cast is padded out with Latino characters, the heroes are two white guys whose violent actions are necessary to help them. Beatriz can’t act in her own interests, because her death motivates the entire plot.
These problems lead to a dull film. Memory espouses a black-and-white morality wherein violence is justified as long as it’s aimed at the right people. Alex’s past as a hitman, when he undoubtedly killed people who did far less harm than pedophiles, is shrouded in the fog of his fading memory. This prevents him from becoming an interesting character. Instead, Memory falls into an endless line of films about a hitman doing one last job, with Alex’s health problems the only gimmick to distinguish it from the pack.
