News Directed by Robert Lorenz

Directed by Robert Lorenz.
 

It didn’t take Liam Neeson long to backpedal on his 2017 claim that he was “retired” from action films and while his most recent release Honest 

Thief double-underlined the more absurd reality of a 68-year-old Neeson punching men half his age, The Marksman proves that the actor’s age need not work against him when the material is a little more pragmatic.
To be clear, this western-tinged action thriller is no great work of cinema, but it spins enough watchability out of its No Country for Old Men-lite – or perhaps Logan-lite? – presentation that audiences may find themselves able to easier weather the wheelbarrow full of cliches the script dumps at their feet.

Jim Hanson (Neeson) is a bereaved, impoverished rancher living a modest life on the Arizona-Mexico border, when one day he stumbles across a mother, Rosa (Teresa Ruiz), and her 11-year-old son, Miguel (Jacob Perez), illegally crossing into the U.S. while fleeing the cartel pursuing them on the other side.

A scuffle on the border leaves Rosa dead and Jim fleeing the scene with Miguel in tow, and as the cartel heavies enter the U.S. to finish the job, Jim finds himself struggling to protect young Miguel – and stay alive himself.

Easy though it might be to roll one’s eyes at yet another Liam Neeson action thriller where he plays a downtrodden gunslinger with a heart of gold, there is something to be said for a film that knows what it is, accepts its dramatic limitations, and just has at it.

The slightly more adventurous setting and style certainly help, too. In some respects The Marksman is what many likely hoped Rambo: Last Blood would be; an old-fashioned action-western where the grizzled veteran protects the innocent party from the big, bad cartel. It is a shame, however, that the content rating here is strictly PG-13, meaning bloody squibs are disappointingly few-and-far-between.

The film is co-written and directed by Robert Lorenz, who has served as both producer and assistant director on countless Clint Eastwood joints over the last 25 years, and also made his solo directorial debut with 2012’s Eastwood baseball drama Trouble with the Curve. If you can abide its beat-to-beat storytelling formula, complete with comically generic gangster villains scarcely worth mentioning, this is an entertainingly competent, above-average Neeson effort.

A lot of its success comes down to the material’s refusal to characterise Hanson as anything less than a broken down, over-the-hill guy who is clearly too old for this shit. With a slightly scruffy beard and cutting a lean figure, this is undoubtedly Neeson at his most grizzled, yet Lorenz’s script also has the good sense to hurl a few wryly witty one-liners the actor’s way, ensuring Jim is anything but a humourless hero.

Gladly, you don’t see much of Neeson effortlessly overpowering much younger men here, with his weapon of choice instead being a sniper rifle, immediately rendering Jim’s combat success against scores of anonymous cartel goons plausible enough.

But the film owes as much to its appealing lead actor as it does his two primary screen partners. Jacob Perez makes for a natural as his young road partner Miguel, with the two sharing some periodically moving banter, especially when spilling their guts about their respective losses. Every action star gets the Mercury Rising-type vehicle they deserve – that is, paired with an imperiled young target – and thankfully this is one of the less-contrived to come down the pike in recent times.

Beyond his pint-sized human screen partner, Neeson is also teamed with a gorgeous Collie named Jackson, who in addition to being an adorable companion for our hero even occasionally provides combat aid, tugging at the pant-legs of bad guys and providing the necessary distraction for Jim to get his edge back.

In the supporting human stakes, though, Katheryn Winnick is more or less wasted here as Jim’s step-daughter Sarah, who of course also happens to be a cop working in the area. Winnick does about as much with the role as an actor can, though the script could lose her character entirely and be no worse a movie.

But what is any western-spiced film without some visual eye candy? In that sense The Marksman absolutely has you covered, with DP Mark Patten milking the pure orange Arizona landscape for every drop it’s worth. Combined with Lorenz’s solid yet unmistakably workmanlike control of the picture, the spritely scenery ensures the film’s 108 minutes are never less than fleet-footed.

It is easy to imagine multiple versions of this film which were both vastly superior and much, much worse. It’s an undeniably familiar story the ending of which won’t surprise many, not to forget a cheap end-of-second-act twist, nor an over-earnest musical score from 24 composer Sean Callery, but it also maintains a pacy clip from start to finish and delivers the basic goods with acceptable aplomb inside of a reasonable runtime. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

The Marksman’s conventional genre indulgences are elevated by its middle-brow aspirations; some gorgeous Arizona scenery and a Neeson protagonist more keen to embrace – rather than disguise – the actor’s longevity.Directed by Adam Wingard ("The Guest"), and written by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (who wrote the first film in the series), "Godzilla vs. Kong" continues this series' tradition of moving the master narrative about the Monarch project forward while letting each successive team of filmmakers do their own thing. The first entry in the series, "Godzilla," was "Close Encounters of the Kaiju Kind," unveiling its creatures in Steven Spielberg magic-and-wonder mode, and introducing the franchise's unifying premise: giant creatures older than the dinosaurs once lived on the earth's surface, feeding on residual radiation from the Big Bang, then moved inside as that energy ebbed, hibernating in the "Hollow Earth" until humans disturbed their slumber with nuclear testing, strip mining, and the like.

This premise was fused to a philosophy that stayed consistent from film to film. Something like: the kaiju don't hate us. They don't even mean us harm (though they do enjoy a human snack now and then). They're animals jockeying for dominance, over territory and each other. If we hadn't treated Earth like a toilet for centuries, they would've stayed beasts of song and legend, talked about but never seen.

"Godzilla," the Vietnam-era period piece "Kong: Skull Island," and the Calling All Kaiju! extravaganza "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" also established a top secret, international, decades-in-existence organization, the Monarch Project, that linked the films across release years and story decades. (Monarch predates the '70s action of "Skull Island"; it was formed in the 1950s.) Of course all this stuff was modeled on binding elements in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly the the S.H.I.E.L.D.-like agents and scientists of Monarch, and the post-credits scenes revealing the beasts-on-deck. But while some films were more MCU-like than others—the first is the least compromised—the kaiju never devolved into handmaidens of commerce. The most disarming thing about the Monsterverse is its horror, sorrow, and incredulity at the sight of humans dodging extinction-level threats while failing to accept that they can't defeat, reverse or even negotiate with them, only learn to coexist with them. That's why the shots of soldiers and tanks and planes and battleships unloading on these beasts are so absurd. They're cavemen throwing rocks at the sun.

At first, "Godzilla vs. Kong" appears to step back from the tradition of environmental doom-saying and pre-grieving. But those elements turn out to have been sublimated, or submerged, like kaiju, retreating into the earth's core until rude forces bait them to return. A beguiling opening sequence establishes that, following a storm that wiped out Skull Island, King Kong has been moved to a research facility beneath a virtual reality dome that simulates his jungle habitat. He's being studied by anthropological linguist Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her hearing-impaired adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), sole survivor of the island's Iwi tribe. 

Soon after, Godzilla, who hasn't been seen since he killed the three-headed extraterrestrial dragon Ghidorah, attacks the Pensacola, Florida research facility of Apex Cybernetics. Monarch scientist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler)—father to kaiju-whisperer Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown), and former husband of the late renegade Monarch scientist Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), who turned eco-terrorist in the last film—states that "Godzilla is killing people, and we don't know why." We know. Godzilla is an "apex predator." Like the gladiators in the "Highlander" series, there can be only one. Godzilla is obviously going after Apex (not a name that hides true intent!) because he's threatened by something within the facility. This is a corporation that can create mechanical, um, beings. You could say robots. Or robot monsters. You could even say that Apex could make mecha versions of Godzilla, wink wink.

The filmmakers don't knock themselves out pretending that we can't see where this is headed. The screenplay is front-loaded with cards-on-the-table foreshadowing, including a scene where Apex founder and CEO Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir) convinces Hollow Earth expert Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to lead an expedition to the planet's core and help him access a primeval power source that he needs for his, well, project, which will, er, re-establish humanity as the earth's, I suppose you could say, apex predator (cue ominous synthesizer music). So the only remaining pertinent questions are (1) "How soon until Godzilla and Kong fight for the first time?"; (2) "Who will win the first fight, and the rematches?"; and (3) "When will Kong and Godzilla team up?" 

The film's "no muss, no fuss" story frees up space to develop relationships—not just between humans, but humans and monsters, and monsters and monsters. The childless Lind, the surrogate parent Andrews, and the orphaned Jia learn to trust each other and work together until they've formed a makeshift nuclear family, like Ripley, Hicks and Newt in "Aliens." Madison bonds with conspiratorial podcaster, muckraker, and Apex investigator Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) from afar because he shares her cynical, questing worldview. She trusts his voice and message so implicitly that she embarks on a road trip to find him with help from her friend Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison, unfortunately saddled with the least-necessary character—an exposition-spoonfeeding chatterbox nerd, reminiscent of Bradley Whitford's character in the last movie). Madison lost her brother in one of the first film's kaiju disasters, then lost her mom in "King of the Monsters." By the end of this one, she's acquired a big-brother-like partner in the form of Bernie, and takes a scolding but affectionate quasi-parental tone with Josh (situationally becoming the mom that Maddie was robbed of—by madness, then death). 

More consequential and moving, though, are the human/monster and monster/monster relationships. Kong and Jia are a magical screen team, in the tradition of heart-tugging pairings in animal pictures like "The Black Stallion," "Free Willy," and "E.T." The latter resonates extra-hard. The movie treats Kong's heartbeat as a conduit to Jia's mental stat