In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

In short: The Marksman (2021)

Denouncing illegals to the Border Patrol, losing his ranch to the bank and drinking too much is all in a day’s work for embittered ex-marine Jim (Liam Neeson). He is coming up for his spot on a redemption arc, though, when he encounters Rosa (Teresa Ruiz) and her son Miguel (Jacob Perez). He does his customary denouncing bit, but when some cartel soldiers from the other side of the border show up, he does defend the two. Rosa doesn’t make it, and asks the rancher to get her son to her family in Chicago with her dying breath, promising him all her earthly goods. At first, Jim doesn’t realize that said earthly goods include a sack full of dollars and hands Miguel over to his stepdaughter (an underused Katheryn Winnick) from the border patrol – his wife is of course dead because this is that kind of film.

On finding said sack and seeing a car full of cartel people waiting for Miguel to be transported away by the Border Patrol, Jim does change his mind about what to do about the child. As you can imagine, this isn’t going to stay about the money for him.

After the abomination that was Honest Thief, this unassumingly competent film directed by Robert Lorenz (better known as a producer for various Clint Eastwood films) is rather a step back up for our lead Liam Neeson, who here finds himself again in a film with an actual, mostly coherent script (by Lorenz, Danny Kravitz and Chris Charles). It’s also a script completely devoid of any surprises and full of well-worn clichés if you know the genre/have seen other films from Neeson’s Man of Violence career stage. But then, not every film needs to reinvent the wheel (or invent a new wheel), as long as it manages to actually cover its genre standards decently.

Which The Marksman does in an unhurried tempo, seemingly genuinely interested in its characters even though they aren’t original, and spending a lot of time with them before the shooting starts. Even though the chemistry between Neeson and Perez isn’t anything to write home about, the actors elderly and very young do put effort in, never letting the character building devolve into the film shuffling its feet.

Once the violent denouement arrives, it is shot with the same workmanlike craftsmanship, leaving The Marksman a perfectly watchable movie.