Liam Neeson has another action movie and somebody should tell him that he needs to quit making quasi sequels to the Taken series. At what point are we not supposed to believe that his new character who is ex-military and a government agent isn’t just really Brian Mills from Taken. After all, all the characters he plays have a special set of skills whether he’s a government agency that can get people out of bad situations, a marksman, or a really clever bank robber who takes down corrupt FBI agents. This is how I feel after watching Liam Neeson’s latest movie, Blacklight. I’m not saying that he isn’t entertaining, but we’ve seen this movie before. Sure, it has somewhat of a different plot and different character names, but it feels very much like a Taken movie. Liam Neeson plays a government agent working for the FBI that specializes in getting people out of tough situations until his family is threatened  because he knows too much… Like I said, we’ve seen this story before. Honestly, they could have made this movie Taken 4 where he’s a grandfather helping to take care of his daughter Kim’s, child. I didn’t necessarily hate the movie, but I’m not telling you to rush out to the theater to go see it. It’s a $2 Redbox rental at best. However, it did have another great Irish actor in it, Aiden Quinn plays an FBI director of sorts.

So let’s get to what’s good about this movie. It has a lot of great action. Liam Neeson is pretty good in it even though he’s really just Brian Mills from the Taken movies. When a former agent wants to tell the truth about all the secret missions that he and Liam Neeson’s character did and his character is caught in the crossfire of trying to protect his boss / friend this leads to his family being threatened to where he has to hunt down the people who are trying to kill him and his family.

There’s gun fights and entertaining car chases. It has the feel of a good espionage thriller even though you feel like you’ve seen this movie before. As I said it’s entertaining and Liam Neeson does a good job. Even if Liam Neeson basically makes the same movies over and over, we really can’t complain about because it’s not like other actors haven’t done that before. John Wayne pretty much made the same Western over and over. Why can’t we be entertained by actors basically doing the same movie over and over? So, I will at least credit Liam Neeson for providing some good entertainment.

But here’s what makes this movie bad. It’s not so terrible that it’s not worth watching, but it sure as hell isn’t worth the full price movie ticket. The biggest problem with this film is it feels very familiar and we have seen this before. This story would have been perfect if it really was Taken 4. I could be more forgiving of this movie if it had just said what it’s trying to be, but the filmmakers are trying to fool us and thinking that this is some original movie with Liam Neeson while trying to be a familiar Liam Neeson movie that we love. Sorry, I for one am not falling for that. Also, it’s not really convincing that this is an FBI story when you can clearly tell the city you’re in is not in the United States. It was filmed in Australia and that was made evident by all of the wonderful Australian actresses the film had. I love Caroline Brazier from the Australian TV show Rake and she does a great job as a newspaper editor in this movie. All I’m saying is it’s not very believable that you are around Washington DC when you clearly have no exterior shots of Washington DC. At least the X-Files TV show used the same shot for the FBI building and all 200 of their episodes. And I’m sure there’s some free used footage out there that they could have used. The main issue is this film is trying to be something that it’s clearly not. It really feels like a B-Action movie and you know what, B-Movies can be great when they know what they are!

Maybe I’m nitpicking too much because I’ve seen way too many movies, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, familiarity can be the death of movies. We’ve seen this Liam Neeson movie before and that is Blacklight’s biggest problem. Yes, Liam Neeson is entertaining, but it’s not enough to make this a great movie and just like Harrison Ford, at some point, we can’t believe you as an action star anymore Liam Neeson. So, here’s my suggestion for the movie if you chose to watch. Don’t pay a full-price movie ticket, it’s worth a cheap rental or watching it for free on a streaming service. It isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, but the action is good enough that you will be entertained for two hours and be able to escape reality for a little while. Sometimes that’s all you really need in a movie and at this point, Liam Neeson as an action star provides that. The movie is average and that’s probably being gracious. However, Liam Neeson can still kick some ass and perhaps that’s the only reason to watch Blacklight!