And the turmoil experienced by Agent Hall (Anthony Ramos), who got his arm twisted into going along with the scam, is fraught but weightless. The two rogue agents make one dumb move after another (I never bought the first murder committed by Courtney’s Agent Nevins, who starts off as a grubby opportunist and turns, on a dime, into a baby-faced sociopath). The idea of a super-criminal turning himself in is intriguing, but once the plan gets blown apart, “Honest Thief” becomes a glumly standard piece of B-movie Tinkertoy, with no surprises. They, of course, are messing with the wrong head case. He and his partner will steal the money, treating Tom as a head case who got off on confessing to a famous crime. It’s not the kind of deal that the FBI generally makes, but before veteran agents Baker (Robert Patrick) and Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan) can decide what to do, they hand the case off to a couple of underlings, led by Agent Nivens (Jai Courtney), who spies the opportunity for a grand payday. He wants to turn himself in and serve time - or, at least, to bargain for a reduced sentence by promising to give back all the money. Tom doesn’t just want to tell Annie about his past. Kate Walsh, from “13 Reasons Why” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” plays Annie as horrified that her beau is a criminal, yet by the time he blows up the villain’s stately suburban Colonial, she just looks at him and says “Wow” with a grin of adoration. “Honest Thief” is “Thief” meets “Widows” meets a cut-rate Jason Bourne film meets a Liam Neeson he’s-angry-and-will-find-you-and-kill-you thriller, all sprinkled with a touch of Neeson-as-stalwart-protector-knight romance. He can’t hide what he does behind his back the way that Neeson’s character in “Widows” hid his true nature from his wife, played by Viola Davis - and, in fact, the situation is parallel enough to make you wonder if this movie knocked off that one. He has kept his identity secret, but he’s known as the In and Out Bandit, and he has amassed a fortune of $9 million, which he keeps, in cash, in a couple of anonymous storage units.īut now that Tom is with Annie (he met her because she’s the manager of the storage-unit facility), he wants to fess up. His targets were small-town banks, with old vaults that go back to the ’50s, and his strategy was to enter the bank through the air-conditioning vent on the Friday night of a three-day weekend, then drill into the vault and blast it open (the pyro-drill scenes are a lot like the ones in Michael Mann’s “Thief”) then he re-plasters and paints the shattered wall. He’s a thief who carried out a series of 12 heists, over a period of eight years, with each robbery perfectly planned and executed. But the hook of “Honest Thief” is that its title isn’t at all ironic. Please, for your own sake, I’d advise you to stop.” He’s an action hero who molds the world in his hands.Īnnie thought Tom was an upstanding guy - not a crook, a bruiser, a gun carrier. He’s saying, with every line, “I don’t want to raise my voice. He’s got his towering full-boil fury, but behind it there’s that lingering controlled hint of Irish politeness. What defines it is that Neeson delivers each low-down threat and underworld proposition as if it were Shakespeare. Directed by Mark Williams, the co-creator of the Emmy-darling Netflix drama “Ozark,” it’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.Įver since “Taken,” 12 years ago, gave a steroid shot to his career (and damned if Neeson, at 68, doesn’t still move with the casual alacrity of a man 30 years his junior), he has made the pulp thrillers he stars in into a genre all their own. I can’t say (though I almost wish I could) that the rest of “ Honest Thief” is that kind of howler. It’s like a moment out of “The Naked Gun.”
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