These instructions include driving from one point to another, where Matt witnesses — and then is gradually implicated in — a string of car bombings that kill several of his co-workers. Noma Dumezweni plays the appealingly dogged, no-nonsense Europol detective who is hot on his trail.
So far, so familiar, at least in the broadest contours of a story about a man under … let’s just call it duress. (Matt’s wife is also considering divorcing him because he’s emotionally unavailable, and there are hints of possible financial chicanery.) Unlike many of Neeson’s characters, Matt doesn’t possess “a very particular set of skills” here, as the actor’s character in “Taken,” Bryan Mills, so euphemistically described his own lethality. Matt has a driver’s license and his wits. And maybe that’s enough.
Although there’s a certain cozy comfort to watching Neeson and his regular collaborators do their thing for the umpteenth time, a thing the actor has now been doing for 15 years, the whole operation feels more like a well-oiled machine — a cold commodity — than a warm blanket, or even a living thing.
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