Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Marksman’ on VOD, Another in a Growing Pile of Boilerplate Liam Neeson Action Movies

Another year, another movie requiring Liam Neeson to carry a gun and wear a weary expression. Now on VOD, The Marksman is the latest of the stalwart star’s steady-as-she-goes action movies with interchangeable titles and interchangeable characters and interchangeable plots (although I’ll admit that The Grey stands out because it’s the one where Neeson fights WOLVES with his DAMN BARE HANDS). So as Neeson’s wont to do, will he make this movie good enough to watch, or is it just crappy in spite of him? Let’s find out.

THE MARKSMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jim’s (Neeson) dwindling cattle ranch in Naco, Arizona butts right up against the Mexican border fence. We meet him as he lines up a coyote (literal, as in the four-legged animal) in his rifle sights and guns it down for killing one of his calves. Foreshadowing? Symbolism? MAYBE! He drives his battered American-made pickemup truck along the small portion of property he has left after selling chunks of it out of desperation. Sometimes he finds thirsty, suffering, vulnerable Mexican people in the scrub and reporting them to the border patrol: “Found one,” he says into his radio, and we’d find such objectification more objectionable if he hadn’t just shown some kindness and given the man some water.

He gets back to his house where he’s met by a bank jerk delivering a foreclosure notice. Jim points to a hill and tells the jerk that’s where his wife’s ashes are spread, but the jerk just reminds him he has 90 days, maybe less, to pay up or get out. Jim’s a Marine Corp vet who’s about to lose his farm because his late wife’s medical bills crippled him financially: America! He’s also an alcoholic whose stepdaughter Sarah (Katheryn Winnick), who happens to work for the border patrol, has to schlep his drunk butt home from the local watering hole. This is precisely the type of nothing-to-lose situation that’s ripe for Jim to, oh, I don’t know, come across a Mexican single mom and her son sneaking through the fence while being chased by cartel stereotypes, forcing him to gun down one of the bad guys during a firefight during which two people are killed, the sociopathic boss’ brother and the single mom, and therefore compelling one to road-trip the boy to his relatives in Chicago while being chased by the hellbent revengeful bad guys. Don’t you HATE when that happens?

Coincidentally, that’s exactly what happens to Jim. So he and young Miguel (Jacob Perez) sidestep the border patrol stepdaughter and take off in the now bullethole-ridden American-made pickemup truck, with the stereotypes hot on their heels. The road ahead of them is full of large, dangerous plot holes (not a typo), but I had confidence that Jim could drive and/or shoot through them at least competently. Not that I’m going to reveal whether or not he does that, because I SHOOT AND KILL SPOILERS FROM VERY FAR AWAY.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Marksman exists somewhere in the muck among Shooter‘s ex-military sniper story, American Sniper‘s bumpy Clint Eastwood politics, a Clint Eastwood grumpy-old-man movie, a Clint Eastwood grumpy-old-man Western and a half-dozen Liam Neeson actioners like one of the Takens, Non-Stop and/or The Commuter.

Performance Worth Watching: Even in prosaic mediocrities like The Marksman, Neeson’s deep-sigh depictions of sad-guy desperation have just enough soul to make us almost care about what happens. (If you want a great recent Neeson performance, queue up Ordinary Love, but be warned, there’s no action or dumbass cliches in it.)

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” — William Munny to the Schofield Kid, Unforgiven

Er, I mean, “Nothing feels good about killing a man.” — Jim to young Miguel, The Marksman

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I know what you’re thinking — is this yet another sniper movie? Almost. It’s actually less original than that, being a conglomeration of generic characters working their way through a sloppyplot stacked with yeah-RIGHT eyeroller moments that gun down our suspension of disbelief from 375 meters away. Everything here is a cliche as weary as Neeson’s facial expressions: Tough-guy vet lost his wife, is losing the farm, drinks too much, bonds with the orphan boy on a road trip, gives the kid a shooting lesson, is way smarter than the bad guys, exists in a story that conveniently ignores the conflict of interest of his border patrol stepdaughter working his case, etc.

I’m surprised Jim doesn’t undergo a softening of his worldview, but it’s defined with enough vagueness that one can’t help but conclude that director/co-screenwriter Robert Lorenz is trying very hard to be apolitical. Jim’s take on immigration is that the government needs to get its act together, a no-shit-sherlock assertion that’s generically critical of The State of Things, but flies in the face of what we actually see in the movie, which is a distasteful depiction of drugs and thugs leaking out of Mexico. But this is Hollywood, so we’ll just give it a pass, right? NOPE: Looking beyond its basic-thriller plot, this movie is junked up with thoughtless, problematic subtext fitting a grossly xenophobic political narrative.

I feel the need to point out how The Marksman features the dumbest gun-store scene since the Bruce Willis Death Wish remake, and offers a crucial life lesson about NOT circling your road-trip destination on an atlas with a red felt-tip pen because it makes it easier for the Mexican bad guys to follow you — Mexican bad guys who, by the way, are so deeply connected that they’ve got cops on their payroll deep into the U.S., cops who conveniently patrol the exact same roads our protagonists are taking to Chicago. It’s really quite remarkable. Sure seems like there’d be more commonsensical ways of getting to a final shootout between the aging vet and the murderous heavies at a Midwestern farm that’s curiously populated with zero farmers, but I’m not a screenwriter earning piles of Hollywood money to write this dreck.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Neeson has used his charismatic presence to single-handedly rescue some boilerplate action movies from the scrap heap, but The Marksman is not one of them.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Marksman