The Foreigner

2017 is going down as the year of the sullen spleen where everybody’s seeking payback, from Asgardians to American Horror Story voters, so naturally, with Liam Neeson taking the morning train, it’s left up to old men with verbal skills to deliver this year’s revenge thriller. Only the problem is we’ve come to expect spine-twisting action from a Jackie Chan movie and he’s missing from well over half this picture. When terrorists blow up a bank resulting in the death of his daughter, Quan, an American-trained special forces soldier who is now in his 60s, wants to know who’s responsible. Nobody’s talking but when he sees Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan), a former IRA member turned Irish diplomat, on television, Quan becomes convinced he’s connected to the killers. All Hennessy wants is to preserve his legacy as peacekeeper but when he’s targeted, there’s hell to pay. Based on a novel by Stephen Leather titled The Chinaman, I wondered why they refer to Chan’s character throughout the film as “that damned Chinaman” which is probably less offensive than calling him “that damned foreigner”!

[R]