‘Retribution’: Liam Neeson to Growl His Way Through a New Riff on ‘Speed’

retribution liam neeson

Liam Neeson‘s late-stage career as an action star is set to continue in Retribution, the latest film from Predators director Nimród Antal.

We just ranked all of the Old Man Liam Neeson action movies last week, and it sounds like we’ll need to update that list after this one enters the fray. Get the details about the new movie below.

Deadline reports that Studiocanal, The Picture Company, and Ombra Productions are teaming up to make Retribution, an action thriller which seems poised to enter the upper ranks of the Old Man Liam Neeson action film hall of fame. The story involves a businessman who discovers that an unknown assailant has wired a bomb to his car, and the villain threatens to blow up the car if the businessman doesn’t follow a series of commands throughout the day. And there’s a twist, too: the businessman’s family is in the car with him.

Retribution is actually a remake of a 2015 Spanish film called El Desconcido, which looks pretty damn tense:

If the idea of Liam Neeson starring in a Speed riff sounds to you like something that Neeson’s frequent collaborator Jaume Collet-Serra would direct, you’re not alone. After all, Collet-Serra previously directed Run All Night, Unknown, Non-Stop, and The Commuter. He’s carved out a nice little corner for himself making these masculine, mid-budget 1990s action throwbacks, so I was a little surprised to find that he wasn’t going to be directing this one. But it turns out he actually is involved with this project: Collet-Serra is one of the producers on the movie because Ombra Productions is his production company. Juan Sola (The Commuter), Andrew Rona (Equilibrium), and Alex Heineman (Come Play) will also serve as producers.

Directing duties go to Nimród Antal, who was most recently behind the camera for two episodes of Servant, M. Night Shyamalan’s AppleTV+ show. In addition to the 2010 film Predators, Antal has also helmed movies like Kontrol, Armored, Vacancy, and Metallica: Through the Never. He strikes me as a stripped-down, nuts-and-bolts type of filmmaker who can deliver a movie like this on time and under budget…but will he be able to give it that mysterious X factor which can be found in the best of Neeson’s action filmography?

Chris Salmanpour, who doesn’t have any produced screenplay credits to his name yet, is writing the script with Andrew Baldwin, who wrote The Take, an action thriller starring Idris Elba and Richard Madden that was originally known as Bastille Day and which recently spiked in viewership to become one of Netflix’s most popular catalogue titles for a brief period earlier this year.

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