‘Memory‘, the 2022 film directed by Martin Campbell, has bigger ambitions than just being another action movie. Campbell, who has an uneven filmography in quality (if we measure it by the stars awarded by critics or the ratings on IMDB) but who makes films that appeal to the public, used a script that is a remake of a Belgian film, in turn a screen version of a novel. The story of a professional assassin whose memory begins to be eroded by Alzheimer’s disease is an interesting enough theme to have attracted the attention of stars like Liam Neeson and Monica Bellucci, who probably hoped that ‘Memory‘ would not be another production in the category of not very successful movies made after the peaks of their careers. Unfortunately, the screenwriters and the director preferred to develop merely the action thread and thus the opportunity to make a quality psychological thriller was missed.
The story is set in a Texas town on the Mexican border and in Mexico, but much of the filming took place in … Bulgaria during the pandemic. Liam Neeson plays a hitman who begins to have memory lapses. He knows the reason, because his brother is hospitalized in a specialized institution, in an advanced stage of dementia. When he refuses to carry out a mission that exceeds even the limits of his morality as a professional assassin, he himself becomes the target of the organizations that had paid him for his crimes until then. Between him, those who pursue him, the corrupt local police and FBI agents, a deadly game begins, strewn with many corpses.
It is worth noting the presence in the cast of Guy Pearce, an excellent actor who played in another film in which the hero suffers from amnesia, ‘Memento’ – Christopher Nolan’s second film. Liam Neeson and Monica Bellucci do pretty much what is expected of them. The result is a fairly well-written and made action flick, better than others in the series of films of this genre that featured Liam Neeson over the past decade, but the very part that could have been the most interesting is relegated to the rank of pretext. Action movie lovers will be satisfied, I think. Those interested in psychological thrillers should also look for the original – ‘The Memory of a Killer’ by Belgian director Erik Van Looy.