Review: 'Honest Thief' awkwardly shoehorns a romance into a by-the-numbers Liam Neeson action movie
The not-so-thrilling action thriller “Honest Thief” seems to answer the question nobody asked: What would it look like if you inserted 20 minutes of a Hallmark movie into a Liam Neeson vehicle?
Neeson plays Tom Dolan, a Boston-based bank robber — known to the law as the In-and-Out Bandit for his smooth ability to get into bank vaults and out again without being caught. It’s not a nickname he particularly likes, and he gives up his safe-busting ways when he meets Annie Wilkins (Kate Walsh), a comely psychology grad student. A year after they meet, he buys her a house, and decides he’s going to come clean to the Feds.
Dolan calls the Boston FBI office with a proposal: He’ll confess to the 12 bank robberies he performed over eight years, if the Feds give him a reduced sentence at a minimum-security prison near Boston, so he can be near Annie. The senior Fed who takes his call, Agent Sam Baker (Robert Patrick), is interested in what Dolan has to say, so he sends two junior agents, John Nivens (Jai Courtney) and Ramon Hall (Anthony Ramos), to check out Dolan’s story.
Nivens and Hall find $3 million of Dolan’s $9 million in ill-gotten cash, and Nivens convinces Hall to take the cash for themselves and double-cross Dolan. Nivens’ plan to kill Dolan hits a snag when Baker shows up at the meeting place — so Nivens kills Baker, and pins it on Dolan. And, oh, Annie showed up at the meet just in time to see Dolan and Nivens fall out a second-story window.
This is how Dolan ends up on the run, simultaneously dodging bullets, matching wits with Baker’s partner, Agent Myers (Jeffery Donovan), and explaining to an incredulous Annie the parts of his life that he neglected to mention during their courtship. These scenes turn out to be painfully awkward, as Neeson and Walsh have no romantic chemistry — certainly not enough to carry the weight of the movie’s main plot point: Whether love is stronger than money, or worth all the pain Neeson’s Dolan is enduring to dodge every cop in Boston.
Director Mark Williams, the creator of the TV series “Ozark,” and his co-writer, Steve Allrich, create a by-the-numbers action chase thriller that borrows the plotting of “The Fugitive” with little of that movie’s charm or wit. The characters — including Neeson’s Dolan, Walsh’s Annie and all of the FBI agents — are thin sketches, each with a single personality trait and no other emotional complications.
Unfortunately, the action sequences also are rote and uninteresting, moving from car chase to gunfight to fistfight with few variations in texture or tempo. Even with the reliable Neeson getting revved up to “Taken”-style revenge, “Honest Thief” only steals 99 minutes of the viewer’s time.
——
‘Honest Thief’
★★
Opens Friday, October 16, at theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for strong violence, crude references and brief strong language. Running time: 99 minutes.