Honest Thief (2020) * *

 

Directed by:  Mark Williams

Starring:  Liam Neeson, Kate Walsh, Jeffrey Donovan, Jai Courtney, Anthony Ramos, Robert Patrick

Liam Neeson action movies are becoming a genre of their own.   The plots may interchange, but Neeson usually plays a sixty-something former cop/military man who can outwit, outmuscle, outshoot, and outsmart men half his age.    He may be flawed and does bad things, like rob banks as he does in Honest Thief, but he is generally a good guy at heart and wants to do the right thing.   In Honest Thief, he plays Tom Dolan, a safecracker who has robbed banks in seven states over the last nine years.  Dubbed the In and Out Bandit, Tom does his robbing at night and vanishes without a trace.   One day, while looking for a storage facility to store his boxes of ill-gotten cash, he meets and falls in love with Annie, who works at the place.   He stops robbing banks, but feels guilty that he has to lie to her about his past, so he calls the FBI and works out a deal:   He'll turn over the $9 million he stole in return for a light sentence and a chance to start his life anew.

The agent in charge (Patrick) is skeptical of Tom's story, since it seems numerous people crank the FBI with such confessions, so he sends two younger agents (Courtney and Ramos) over to investigate Tom's story.   Tom indeed has money stashed away, and the agents decide to bump off Tom and keep the loot for themselves.   Patrick is shot by the crooked FBI guys, and they try to frame Tom for the murder.  They don't know they are dealing with a man with a particular set of skills, so the plan goes awry and Tom is on the lam.   Insert generic car chases, fights, and shootouts, and you have Honest Thief.

Annie is drawn into the fray, and decides to stick by her man even though he was once a thief and is now on the run.    This of course will put her in danger.   An honest FBI agent (Donovan), who brings the dog he received in his recent divorce (don't ask) with him to work, suspects Tom may be innocent and the agents are the villains.   Donovan normally plays the smug villain, and this is a nice change of pace for him.   Walsh is suitably likable, and thus we wonder why she didn't just go somewhere else instead of being sucked into this.   Just to show Tom is really a good soul, he tells his story about how he got into robbing banks and how he never spent a dime of the money he stole.   Still, it must be a drag schlepping nine million dollars around in cardboard boxes from place to place, a problem I suppose most people wish they had.   If Tom were a tad more enterprising, he could've figured a way to launder the money in banks.   In for a penny, in for a pound, so he may as well have taken the extra step.

Some of these movies are good, like Taken (first one only), Run All Night, and Cold Pursuit.   Honest Thief doesn't rank among the better films of the Liam Neeson genre.   It is a tepid chase picture which checks the boxes if you're eagerly awaiting another Liam Neeson movie where he kicks people's asses, but probably won't do much for anyone else.