Plot: Accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and with nothing to lose, a war hero leads law enforcement on a cross-country car chase with the help of his brothers in arms and a sympathetic public rooting for his getaway.
Review: Since starring in Taken, it often feels like Liam Neeson takes every script that comes his way. Having played spies, hitmen, killers, and truckers, Neeson has played characters in films across virtually every genre. The latest addition to the Neeson Season canon is The Mongoose, a feature-length car chase that is lighter on the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay of prior films but with more high-speed action. But while the film wants to be received as a rip-roaring thrill ride, it is instead bogged down by clunky dialogue, nonsensical plot developments, and some of the most cliche characters in recent memory. The Mongoose is bad, even compared to the weaker films Liam Neeson has starred in over the past decade, and yet still manages to set a new low with the latest awful portrayal of AI in a motion picture.
Opening with Ryan “Fang” Flanagan (Liam Neeson) already on the run from the law in a fully-loaded Shelby Super Snake sports car, The Mongoose flashes back to the events that put him on the run as well as twenty years earlier when he was an active-duty soldier. After being a prisoner of war and losing one of the soldiers under his command, Fang refused to ever be captured again. After getting divorced from Tara (Marisa Tomei), Fang struggles with the memories of his tours of duty. So, when he accidentally commits a crime, he steals a car and heads off from Kentucky through Arkansas and Texas to evade the authorities. Enlisting the help of his former squadmates and friends Tanker (Ving Rhames) and Munch (Marcus Thomas), Fang drives fast and hard away from the cops. With a militant Texas cop, Major Walter Pope (Michael Chiklis), determined to catch him, Fang uses the help of veterans and sympathetic American civilians to get away free, especially with CNN and other news outlets broadcasting the entire chase.
There is so much about The Mongoose that makes little to no sense, and that doesn’t even include the film’s bizarre title. Yes, you do learn what The Mongoose represents, but it comes very late in the movie. Most of the film takes place inside the Shelby Super Snake, a beautiful car that is made ugly by the decision to incorporate a fictional AI interface for Liam Neeson to interact with. Named Helene (voiced by Stella Stocker), Fang talks to the car’s AI, which is way better than Siri yet somehow as capable as KITT from Knight Rider. Liam Neeson interacts more with Helene than any other character in the film. In fact, Neeson shares the most screen time with Marisa Tomei in what amounts to two scenes. The rest of the time, he is behind the wheel and talking to people through the car’s Bluetooth speaker. Neeson gets to be a smartass in several scenes that try to lighten the mood of the film, but they all fall flat as the dialogue is so poorly written that an AI screenwriter could have come up with better one-liners.
The film tries to be a jingoistic and pro-veteran story that rallies everyone around Fang to help him escape the cops, but it never feels authentic in the least. There is one moment where a gas station attendant takes cash from Fang before immediately deciding to rat him out to the police. Another has Fang bring the damaged car to a repair shop that somehow completely fixes it and changes the paint color in under an hour. There is also the fact that The Mongoose was filmed in Australia, with plant life and landscapes appearing nothing like anything you would see in North America. There were a couple of moments where I began to get hopeful that The Mongoose would turn into a fun action movie in the vein of The A-Team, but it never gets there. Marisa Tomei gives the strongest performance in the cast while Michael Chiklis does his best Smokey and the Bandit impersonation. I am also pretty sure Ving Rhames may have been drunk during all of his scenes.
Written by Thompson Evans, The Mongoose was directed by Mark Vanselow. Vanselow has been Liam Neeson’s longtime stunt double, having worked with him for two decades, going back to 2006’s Seraphim Falls. Having worked on over a dozen films together, Vanselow has also been stunt coordinator for acclaimed films like The Revenant and the HBO series Westworld. For his directorial debut, Vanselow has a film that does not feature many of the fighting stunts we have come to appreciate in Liam Neeson movies, instead opting for a lot of driving, crashes, and explosions. The war-zone flashbacks feel cheaply made, while the bulk of the budget seems to have been spent on securing the Shelby cars used for filming and licensing the various jukebox classic songs that populate the soundtrack. Little of The Mongoose makes a lot of sense, with the actors all appearing to be there just to get a paycheck, and the stuntwork pales in comparison to what could have been a serviceable action movie.
Even as far as free movies go, The Mongoose is not worth the price of admission. A leak of the film made it onto file-sharing services almost two months before its release, and those who saw it then still trashed the movie. This is a movie where Liam Neeson literally phones it in for the entire film, doing little more than sitting behind the wheel for ninety minutes. The Mongoose is what happens when you produce a script with a director who’s never helmed a movie before and a bunch of actors who barely share any time in the same physical space. Terrible script, terrible dialogue, and terrible pacing result in a movie that sometimes wants to be funny and, the rest of the time, wants to take itself seriously, but at no point balances the two enough to be a bit of fun. Stay away from The Mongoose unless you’re a hardcore Liam Neeson fan and really don’t care what happens on screen
The Mongoose opens in theaters on October 30th.
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