“Honest Thief” feels like another run of the mill Neeson lead action flick where he runs around being a middle-aged badass proving to be a modern Stallone/Schwarzenegger style star when most of those guys were pulling back when they were Neeson’s age. Normally that latter strategy is one I avoid as I feel it’s important to know what I’m putting my money into before committing to it. Some people go into films with high expectations and some go in with very low expectations, and then you get the people who have zero expectations and just plan to walk in and see what happens without even knowing what the movie is about. Now Tom is on the run with the FBI thinking he’s fleeing from FBI custody and has to prove his name before he and Annie end up locked up or worse. Unfortunately, things get complicated when he tries to turn himself over to two FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) and they end up double-crossing him and trying to kill him so they can keep the full 9 million for themselves. He’s found love in Annie (Kate Walsh) and wishes to confess and be an honest man spending the rest of his free life with her once he’s released from prison. But now he’s decided to turn himself into the FBI. Tom Dolan (Liam Neeson) goes by the name “The In and Out bandit.” Over the course of several years, Tom has successfully stolen 9 million dollars from small-time banks and has never been caught or identified. “Honest Thief” was my first experiment with that and thankfully, it proved to pay off in the end. This year, I barely knew anything about the majority of the movies being released to the point, I didn’t even watch their trailers and decided to roll the dice and go in blind without knowing anything about the film. Usually, I know about movies years in advance due to my diligent research but lesser, small-sized films tend to slip through my radar and I end up not knowing much about them when they come out. I felt second-hand embarrassment during so many different parts of the movie watching the sappy, hokey interactions between Liam and the higher up fed, the awkward romantic interactions between him and his gf (“aThis movie would be perfect on the Lifetime network…Liam Neeson emasculated for B movie cinema.With so many big tent pole movies getting shoved off to be released god knows when or reduced to a measly direct to streaming service, my local theater could only offer re-showings of classic films or whatever slim pickings were left to put up. But he SPOILER ALERT blew up a house in a residential neighborhood and almost broke the “good” FBI agents arm, who offered help from the back end as if he couldn’t have called for an immediate private investigation of a lower ranking agent. I mean he WAS soft for her, a good guy in some ways. I cringed as his girlfriend just soaked up his rationalizations, feigning reluctant anger at times only enough to not seem a COMPLETE sucker. I swear they were playing light sentimental music when he softly described his bank robbing days or at least that’s what played in my head as he explained in a way that no thinking woman would take at face value after only knowing someone for one year. Even the name “in and out bandit” (in and out, no hold-ups…bandit like some childish cops and robbers nostalgia) was created for us to see him in the least offensive light. SPOILER AHEAD: This movie was mostly feel good.
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