The Marksman

If you, like myself and Key & Peele, have always pondered how awesome it might have been if Liam Neeson had been cast instead of Hugh Jackman in James Mangold’s mutant-action-tear-jerker/instant classic Logan … well, ponder no more. Strip away those adamantium foreclaws and mutantkind in general and it’s suddenly obvious that The Marksman’s plot is predicated on that of Logan, which itself was predicated on everything from Shane to Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional to Peter Bogdonavich’s Depression-era road movie Paper Moon. Hey, to paraphrase Picasso on art and artists, steal from the best. But I digress.

Debuting screenwriters Chris Charles and Danny Kravitz beg, borrow, and steal away for this thriller that eases back on Neeson’s midcareer drift away from Michael Collins, Oskar Schindler, and the soppy widower of Love Actually and into the hyperviolent Taken franchise. Neeson’s always been a man of action going as far back as the knight Gawain in John Boorman’s 1981 epic Excalibur. His recent résumé, from 2011's Unknown to last year's Honest Thief, has reduced him to a righteous vigilante out for justice and damn the consequences: which is frankly unfair to the actor who played one of the first (fairly) realistic superheroes in Sam Raimi’s Darkman [1990] and whose acting chops, no matter the role, are as good as or better than those of any other leading actor working today.

Lorenz’s film casts him as Jim Hanson, a former Marine and Vietnam vet turned rancher on the Arizona/Mexico border who’s having a rough time of it: Cancer took his wife, coyotes are taking his cattle, and now the bank is taking his ranch, all of which lead him to slip back into his presumably old alcoholic ways. Cruising his property in his battered pickup one sullen afternoon he encounters a young woman and little boy who’ve moments before broken through the border fence with generically heinous cartel baddies right behind them. Unfazed, he grabs his rifle and a shoot-out occurs. The woman, Rosa (Ruiz), is mortally injured in the melee, as is cartel jefe Mauricio’s (Raba) brother. The dying Rosa implores Hanson not to turn the boy, Miguel (Perez), into the border patrol and offers him “everything I have.” That turns out to be (surprise!) a bag stuffed to overflowing with cartel cash, exactly the kind of capital gains-free money Hanson needs to satiate the bank. And so the sharpshooting rancher embarks on a road trip to the far north, aka Chicago, where Miguel’s relatives await his arrival. The pair is pursued, obviously, by Mauricio and his gang who in turn are aided and abetted by corrupt U.S. police officials. It all ends exactly the way you think.

This is a more hardscrabble, beaten down version of Neeson’s iconic revengers than most of his action roles, with Hanson coming across as sympathetically appealing despite the cliched storyline. It’s not as much flat-out, goofy, Saturday matinee fun as the actor’s unhinged turn in last year’s Charles Bronson-in-a-snowplow actioner Cold Pursuit, but then again Logan was no X-Men: Days of Future Past. Sometimes it’s best to just keep things simple and comfortingly familiar, cliched though they may be.