Honest Thief

  • 07 Nov - 13 Nov, 2020
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

Some movies feature a training montage in which the star is seen flexing his muscles or honing his firearm skills in preparation for a big battle. There's no such need for that in the latest Liam Neeson vehicle. All Honest Thief needs to do is show its star shopping for supplies in a hardware store to let the audience know that some serious mayhem is about to occur.

Neeson plays Tom Carter, who has spent the last several years meticulously robbing small-town banks while avoiding any violence. Tom is ready to give up his life of crime after meeting and falling in love with the vivacious Annie (Kate Walsh), the manager of the storage facility where he's stashed his impressive $9 million dollars in illicit loot.

Rather than, say, simply returning the money to the authorities anonymously and living happily ever after, the virtuous Tom contacts the FBI and offers to turn himself in and give back the cash in return for a lighter sentence. Unfortunately, he doesn't anticipate that the agents assigned to his case, Nivens (Jai Courtney) and Hall (Anthony Ramos), will double-cross him by framing him for the murder of their superior (Robert Patrick) and trying to kill him.

Those crooked agents have clearly never seen a Liam Neeson movie, since everybody who has knows by now that things don't go well when you try to take something that's his. Soon, Tom and Annie are involved in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against them, even while also being relentlessly pursued by the straight-arrow Agent Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan).

Besides bank robbing, Tom has a particular set of skills stemming from his service as a Marine, including demolitions expertise and being surprisingly effective in hand-to-hand combat with significantly younger men.

Running a sleek 90 minutes before the credits roll, Honest Thief is certainly efficient if not exactly original, with writer/director Williams infusing it with enough quirky character touches to distract from the derivative feeling of it all. Much like its central character, the film at least proves honest in its intentions.

– Compilation

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