Review of BLACKLIGHT: Faithless Feds

February 15, 2022

After a successful political rally, popular human rights activist Sofia Flores (Melanie Jarnson) was murdered by a discreet hit and run. Her despondent boyfriend FBI agent Dusty Crane (Taylor John Smith) went against his original orders and decided that he should tell reporter Mira Jones (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who had been following the career of Flores, the dark and disturbing truth that he knew about her death. 

Black-ops agent Travis Block (Liam Neeson) was ordered by the FBI director Gabriel Robinson (Aidan Quinn) to stop Dusty from spilling the beans. When Dusty was also killed, Travis and Mira began to work together to get to the bottom of things and set things straight. When Travis's daughter Amanda (Claire van der Boom) and granddaughter Natalie (Gabriella Sengos) goes missing, the stakes were raised much higher.

Ever since Liam Neeson became an action star in 2009 with the sleeper box-office hit "Taken" at the ripe old age of 56, his career was given a second wind. "Taken" had sequels in 2012 and 2014. Aside from that he had "The Grey" (2012), "Non-Stop" (2014), "Run All Night" (2015), "The Commuter" (2018), "Cold Pursuit" (2019), "Honest Thief" (2020), "The Ice Road" (2021), among others. This year as he pushes 70, here comes another one. 

I can't blame you if you cannot exactly differentiate the plot of one from the other as there are common tropes in them. The character of Liam Neeson invariably had some sort of elite military or secret agent training which gave him extraordinary skills. There was usually a family member or two whose safety gets threatened that pushes Neeson's character to spring into rescue action mode. Both of these were also here in "Blacklight."

The usual formula was followed to faithfully here that you never felt Neeson was ever in any real danger even as he faced a powerful enemy. As his weakness, Neeson's Travis had to deal with family issues, as his daughter Amanda kept telling him to lay off the paranoia about safety (quite unreasonable and disrespectful of her, if you ask me). The action sequences were pretty standard B-movie quality with nothing memorable to set this one apart. 4/10.