The Mongoose Review: How Long Can Liam Neeson Keep Doing This?

I thought a lot about Liam Neeson while watching The Mongoose. On the face of it, that might seem natural – he is, after all, the star. Critics love writing about movie stars because they have a special power to channel their on-screen history into any given role they play, and if the filmmakers are savvy enough, this can be deployed in all kinds of interesting ways. If you have any familiarity with Liam Neeson, it’s practically inevitable that you spend some of his movies thinking about him, regardless of who he’s meant to be playing.

However, once you get into specifics, it starts to look like a bad sign. While watching this car chase movie about a veteran on the run from the law, I occasionally found myself, say, thinking about how old Neeson is now, and wondering how much longer he can believably play action heroes. I remembered how exciting his performance in The Naked Gun was, and then thought about how much of The Mongoose must’ve been filmed sitting down – and how I had just recently seen Samuel L. Jackson in The Beast, which also gave an aging star a largely seated role. This isn’t really what filmmakers hope to inspire in their viewers by casting a movie star.

I had plenty of thoughts related to what’s actually happening in The Mongoose (some of them positive, most of them not so much), but this running, internal meta-commentary was just as crucial to my viewing experience. And despite how much emphasis we put on “immersion,” that’s not really something I’d hold against it; I enjoyed it more than The Beast, which I’d consider the better film of the two, for just that reason. Make no mistake, The Mongoose is a bad movie, but for viewers in the right state of mind, it’s not a bad time.

The Mongoose’s Car Stunts Can’t Cover Up An Atrocious Script

The story begins in media res, with several police cars in hot pursuit of Ryan “Fang” Flanagan (Neeson) in a red Mustang, and we’re given the pieces of what happened bit by bit. Ryan is a retired military captain who remains haunted by an experience in Afghanistan 20 years ago, when he and his team were taken captive. Through circumstances I’ll leave for the film to reveal, he is believed to have committed a murder, and rather than take the time to let the justice system prove he acted in self-defense, he took off in the dead man’s car. He is dead-set on never going back in a cage, home soil or not.

His high-speed chase is attracting attention. He’s already gone from Kentucky into Arkansas, where the empathetic Major James Tilton (Maurice Marvel Meredith) is already questioning the facts as they’re being presented to him. But Ryan is barreling toward Texas, the jurisdiction of Major Walter Pope (Michael Chiklis), infamous for shooting first and asking questions later. News coverage soon catches the attention of Tara (Marisa Tomei), his ex-wife, and two of his buddies (Ving Rhames & Craig Hosking), as well as a viewing public who end up more sympathetic to him than law enforcement expected.

Unfortunately, we have plenty of opportunities to experience the nonsensical, insultingly lazy script.

Something important to know about The Mongoose is that it’s the feature directorial debut of Mark Vanselow, a longtime stunt performer and coordinator who has doubled for Liam Neeson on many an occasion. As such, it’s no surprise that there’s some pretty good driving in this movie. Ryan ends up needing to actively evade his pursuers on multiple occasions, and the choreography is easy to sit back and enjoy. That’s not to say all the stunt work is flawless, however – one brief hand-to-hand fight scene has enough cuts to make you dizzy. But if the movie was only scenes like these, it would have been better for it.

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