Blacklight is a lesser one of Neeson’s gray-in-the-temple Dad action flicks. It’s not as bad as his worse ones though… but only barely manages to bob around beneath the more almost-there mediocre ones. It certainly tries for more story, at least.

Blacklight stars Liam Neeson as, I dunno, an off-the-books exfiltration agent for the FBI. There’s a grand conspiracy within the FBI that he’s too much of a good guy to know about even though he does a lot of secret, shady things. But it’s also a conspiracy thriller with hard-nosed reporters trying to root out corruption.

The film is a super generic shrug of an actioner… but not offensive. I was bored most of the time but occasionally some action set piece or bit of dialog would pique my interest. The script tries to give Neeson some character this time even though it barely moves the needle when you get down to it.

As far as the conspiracy thriller goes, there’s a major problem in that the audience already knows what’s going on. The reporters are playing catch-up with us, the audience. And that’s no fun for this type of movie. But I guess they needed Neeson to be action guy and not reporter guy so he’s already in on it. But he doesn’t know everything so I guess that’s the twisty angle? I dunno. Structurally the movie is messy in that way.

Unfortunately, the film seems to just… stop… while I was waiting for the final act action set piece. It just ends with me wondering if they ran out of time or budget.

The flick has some talent attached to it and I credit it for trying for more story and character. It’s not super successful due to the structure issues I mentioned though. Not the worst of the lot.

Score: 68