The latest Liam Neeson film arrived on Vudu recently and I gave it a watch. Memory did not last long in the theaters, but there have been decent films starring Liam Neeson over the years. Sure, several of them were interchangeable and forgettable, but not all of them.

Unfortunately, Memory is one that will not stick in my own memory for long either.

Alex Lewis (Liam Neeson) was an assassin-for-hire whose reputation for precision was well known. He was hired to carry out a contract on two people, a lowlife and a little girl. Alex refused to kill the girl, thus breaking the contract. He tried to get the contract revoked in his special brand of violence, but the girl still wound up dead. This sent Alex in a path of vengeance for those involved in the case.

Meanwhile, FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pierce) had been involved with an investigation toward the little girl and her sex trafficking father and her death brought him into the case and crossing paths with Alex Lewis.

Oh, there is one more issue going on here. Alex Lewis was hoping to retire because his own memory was beginning to fail with Alzheimer’s Disease starting to develop, much like his brother, whom we saw for a moment.

Liam Neeson was fine here and he was different than in many of his other roles because he looked really old and shaky. That is, until he wasn’t and was a killing machine.

There were so many times during the film that I stopped and wondered who these people were. The villains were so underdeveloped and were nothing more than a person for Alex to kill. Alex was placed as our protagonist but then so was Vincent. There was a Mexican FBI agent Marquez (Harold Torres) who was constantly being, at best, treated as an outsider and, at worse, treated in a totally racist manner. There was meant to be a twist at the end but it was so poorly foreshadowed that it was painfully obvious what was going to happen.

The film was a mess with a poorly written story with weak characters. Liam Neeson deserves better than this.

2 stars