Movie Breakdown: Blacklight

Pre-Screening Stance:

Blacklight looks like another off-season, throwaway action movie starring Liam Neeson. I’m down to give it a go though because every now and again, the guy gets one of these right (see: Taken or The Grey).

Post-Screening Ramble:

Blacklight is a very dumb, boring movie. The story is centered around Travis Block (Liam Neeson), an off-the-books fixer for the FBI who aggressively zooms around in his obnoxious car and does whatever he needs to in order to protect the agency. One day, a promising young agent goes rogue, and Block is tasked with reeling him in while also making sure a pesky journalist doesn’t report on it. Naturally, he isn’t at all aware of what’s actually going on and then must use his very particular set of skills to figure everything out.

If Blacklight was a crisp 90 minutes and only featured Neeson on a rampage, it would probably work. Unfortunately though, the movie is just far too bloated. For example, there’s a whole subplot about Block wanting to be a better grandfather, which I assume was inserted to soften things up, but it’s just useless and cringe-inducing. For one, his daughter talks to him in the coldest, flattest manner, and these scenes are always made worse by awkward one-liners from Block. He also repeatedly swears that his granddaughter is the most important thing around to him, but the entire movie is just him frequently forgetting her. Toss this in with a whole slew of bad performances and made-for-TV level action sequences, and the result is a movie that’s a total slog. If I were you, I’d skip Blacklight when it hits theaters this Friday, February 11.

One Last Thought:

The product placement in this film is so blatant that it hurts. I assume the biggest check was cut by whatever agency pushes the Dodge Challenger, because it’s so heavily featured that I expected to see it listed in the credits as a character.