Honest Thief is a slight step-up from the usual Liam Neeson revenge punch-upperer. Directed by Mark Williams, the co-creator of Netflix favourite Ozark, it takes everyone’s favourite taciturn vengeance merchant and gives him slivers of character and interesting things to play. It ultimately devolves into a routine, perfectly passable crime thriller, but it has enough to lift it above the likes of Taken 2, Unknown and The Commuter in the action section of the actor’s résumé.
It all starts very promisingly. After an opening news-report montage that sets Neeson’s Tom Dolan up as master thief ‘The In-And-Out Bandit’, we essentially get a meet cute as Neeson has some charming interplay with storage unit manager Annie (Kate Walsh) while he looks to stash his stolen wonga. A year later, the pair are in a relationship and Tom surprises Annie with a house and an offer to move in (again cue some cute banter). Soon Tom’s M.O. becomes clear — he is going to ’fess up to his crimes, hand back the $9 million and do a minimal sentence so he can get back to life with Annie ASAP. The fly in the ointment comes when nefarious Fed John Nivens (Jai Courtney) decides he is going to steal the dosh and place all the blame on Dolan.
Honest Thief begins by doing something modern action flicks rarely do: lavishing time and care on its characters.
Built around a fruitful idea — a master criminal choosing to hand himself in — Honest Thief begins by doing something modern action flicks rarely do: lavishing time and care on its characters. Beyond the Tom-Annie dynamic, even the cops get to talk about things other than plot, with veteran agents Baker (Robert Patrick) and Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan) discussing divorce and dogs. There are some nice character quirks — Dolan hates the sloppy In-And-Out Bandit moniker but admits ‘The Precise Bandit’ doesn’t work — and the film is good on the minutiae of how the thief pulls off his jobs, targeting smaller banks with older vaults that are next door to empty buildings.
It’s just a shame, then, that the second half gives up on the interest in character and telling details in favour of a more pedestrian approach, filled with decent but not spectacular fist-fights, car chases and shoot-outs. There’s something interesting buried in here about guilt and personal responsibility, but Williams doesn’t eke it out, instead choosing to follow Dolan into a hardware store so he can buy stuff to blow shit up. Still, Neeson brings his trademark class, gravitas and persona to the hard-man revenge aspects so that when the time comes to take down the agents who have besmirched his intentions, you know you’re in good hands.
