Movie Review: Memory is Deeply Forgettable

Memory is yet another brain-free bullet fest from Liam Neeson. This time it’s even more potentially offensive as Neeson uses dementia and alzheimers as the tragic backstory for his violent character. In Memory, Neeson is a killer for hire who is slowly slipping into permanent memory loss and it’s as dubious a plot device as you imagine. Why anyone thought that using alzheimers and dementia would be a great backdrop for a generic action movie is beyond me but here we are.

In Memory Liam Neeson stars Alex, a Texas born hitman. There aren’t many laughs in Memory but the idea that we are supposed to believe that Liam Neeson is from Texas is the biggest laugh in the movie. Neeson is Alex and while he’d like to quit the game of killing people for money, he accepts one last big money payday. Alex is to go to his hometown of El Paso, Texas, pause for laughter, okay, sorry, and kill a man who has crossed someone with a lot of money and power.

Alex takes the job and accomplishes his first killer task. However, when Alex sees that his second victim is a 13 year old girl, he decides to terminate the contract. When the girl is killed anyway, Alex turns righteous and begins hunting down his now former employees. Meanwhile, in a coalescing plot, an FBI Agent, Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce, slightly more convincing as an Aussie Texan than Neeson is as an Irish Texan), is on the trail of the same people Alex is now after.

The makers of Memory would like you to enjoy the visceral thrill of watching bad guys get killed by righteous good guys willing to go above the law to deliver a karmic form of justice. They double down on this idea by making the baddies pedophiles and child traffickers. This is all so that we can witlessly enjoy the carnage the movie has in mind. As much as we all would like to see pedophiles and child traffickers suffer, it’s incredibly gross for anyone to ask us to wallow in the carnage as Memory does.

Liam Neeson looks awful in Memory as if he is actually suffering from a degenerative disorder. That may be because he’s a good actor or because he looks haggard from years of abandoning his craft for hack work in low rent action movies. He’s very tired but not yet so tired that he’s ready to pass on a paycheck. Hitman with early onset dementia is all Neeson is given to play in Memory and he enacts it with all of the passion one can muster when you clearly don’t care anymore.

Guy Pearce fairs better as the good guy FBI Agent but not by much. He’s hemmed in on all sides by cliches. He has a boss who keeps trying to take the case away from him for being too much of a badass, he has a tragic backstory, because character’s like this always have tragic backstories, and he loves whiskey because he’s a cop in a cop movie and cop movie cops love whiskey. He’s also a Texan so he has a belt buckle.

Monica Bellucci is the big bad of Memory, a high powered businesswoman who uses her vast fortune to cover up the crimes of her monster of a son. It’s a ludicrously underwritten role that the makers of Memory clearly don’t care about. She exists to provide motivation for the other characters in the movie and has no life or existence of her own. Bellucci’s character is evil because she’s evil. What more do you need?

Me, I need a heck of a lot more than what Memory has to offer.