Liam Neeson plays a Boston mob enforcer with memory problems in his latest tough-guy tale, “Absolution.” The 72-year-old actor has said that he’s looking to wind down the action career that kicked off in 2008 with “Taken,” and it feels like with each new entry that he’s starting to say goodbye to his own particular subgenre. “Absolution” makes it easy.

Scripted by Tony Gayton, “Absolution” marks a reunion for Neeson with his “Cold Pursuit” director Hans Petter Moland. But while that film, about a snowplow driver seeking revenge for his son’s death, had a certain bonkers, Coen brothers-esque dark comedic energy, “Absolution” is more of a dirge, a funereal B-movie riff on Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” that tries to be “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” but ends up falling short.

Neeson’s mustachioed heavy has been knocked around a time or two in his life, in the boxing ring and while collecting debts for his longtime boss (Ron Perlman), and now the boss’ son (Daniel Diemer). He’s losing his grip — he can’t remember his phone number, address or directions, and in line with this point of view, we never get his character’s name in the film. He’s tormented by surreal nightmares about his son who died of an overdose, and has to keeps notes to remember who wants him dead. But his punches still land solidly, and one lands so well at his local dive that he takes out a loudmouth bully, then takes home his girlfriend (Yolonda Ross).

Our man was in the bar drowning his sorrows at the bottom of a bourbon after being diagnosed with CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, after all those blows he’s sustained (despite the fact that CTE can only officially be diagnosed posthumously). With his time running out, what is he going to do with it?

Suddenly, he’s energized to make things right. Specifically with his daughter (Frankie Shaw, of “SMILF,” and the only actor bringing authentic Boston flair to the proceedings), and grandson, Dre (Terrence Pulliam). He enjoys a fly-by-night romance with his latest lady love, but he seems determined not only to set things right for his loved ones, but for anyone else he can too, specifically, and utterly randomly, a sex worker being trafficked by one of the drug dealers he frequently encounters in his line of work.

“Absolution” is only interesting insofar as an entry into the Neeson canon, but not as its own film. The script is derivative, trading in tired tropes and stereotypes, lacking in any real insights or even local color, Shaw notwithstanding. There’s a kernel of something soulful and interesting in the romance between the two battered souls played beautifully by Neeson and Ross, and the far more interesting film would have zeroed in on this unlikely but almost inevitable connection, a bruised but beautiful retribution for this pair. In his lonely apartment, they achieve a rough kind of grace, but the distractions of the grandkid and the vengeful gangsters take away from this subplot that’s the only thing worth watching in “Absolution.”

The script drags down what could have been something a bit offbeat and quirky in Moland’s hands, but the director doesn’t demonstrate the verve he showed off in “Cold Pursuit,” and seems out of his depth in representing the idiosyncrasies of the New England underworld. Neeson bares his tortured soul to his performance — as he always does — but “Absolution” will only be remembered as an installment in this Neeson-action about which some grad student will write a media studies dissertation some day.

———

‘Absolution’

2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for violence, language throughout, some sexual content/nudity and drug use)
Running time: 1:52
How to watch: In theaters Nov. 1

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