The inept thriller “Blacklight” tells of a conspiracy by the FBI to bring “law and order” via different schemes that involve the deaths of American citizens. In the beginning of the film, we see the hit-and-run assassination of a young, popular politician meant to look like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s an upsetting moment, in part because we had just seen her rally people in Washington D.C. by clamoring for healthcare for all, and now the movie makes us envision what a crushing system could do to that in an instant. Inspired by true conspiracies, director Mark Williams’ “Blacklight” is a weak recommendation to just read up on the history of FBI’s COINTELPRO and J. Edgar Hoover instead.
Enter Liam Neeson’s Travis Block, who is not on the FBI payroll but is a crucial life source for their agents. When the agents go too deep undercover, experiencing physical or mental harm, Travis is the soft-spoken, heavily skilled shadow who suddenly appears and rescues them. He got into this job, we learn, from his old Vietnam war buddy, Gabriel Robinson (Aidan Quinn), who is now chief director of the FBI. Travis is brought into the conspiracy when one agent, Dusty (Taylor John Smith), tries to come clean about the FBI’s involvement with the death that he thought to be an accident. Travis soon realizes that the team he’s playing for is corrupt and that they’re putting Americans in danger.
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Co-written by Williams with Nick May (who initially envisioned this story as a 1970s COINTELPRO period piece), “Blacklight” has interesting elements, but loses its momentum from being so scatterbrained in how to present them. For a long while, we know that Block wants to protect FBI business, but it doesn’t become clear until our intrigue has peaked that he’s actually unaware of their nefarious plan, which he certainly doesn’t agree with. We don’t even really understand what he does for the bureau, so much as see that he interacts with the chief director Robinson and Dusty. It’s here too that the movie becomes exceedingly clunky in revealing the overall FBI conspiracy until Robinson just lays it out in an expositional speech to his two boring baddies (which includes a passing shout-out to COINTELPRO). “Blacklight” wants to have the paranoid edge of a ‘70s thriller, but it struggles to set itself up. Instead of making it an awkward reveal midway through, it would have been bolder to say early on what it really wants to–that the FBI has a history of conspiring against and killing innocent American citizens, and it could readily happen in the open again.
Because “family man” must be in Neeson’s contract, Block also has a different responsibility that keeps whiffing on, of being a good grandfather. In saccharine moments, he pleads to his daughter, Amanda, about how he may not have been a good husband or father but maybe he can get things right here, especially if he doesn’t turn his granddaughter into a fellow paranoid. This part is less about conspiracy and more about Block’s anxieties that come from a life of surveillance, an interesting note that the script doesn’t nurture. The larger problem is that these scenes bring out some of the weakest, monotone parts of his acting skills. Neeson sounds bored, we become bored, and it becomes a lost opportunity to explore what makes a real-life Block tick.
The movie has a hollow idealism in how to defeat these evil forces, that change can be brought to these corrupt systems via exposure, even if the history of COINTELPRO shows just how pervasive it is. That potential of justice comes from a reporter named Mira (Emmy Raver-Lampman) who Dusty trusts with the information, and who then sees the FBI’s violence first-hand. As she works with finding the truth in the story, the movie feigns pushing buttons about what kind of shadowy control the FBI would have in these circumstances.
“Blacklight” has a strange habit of gravely undermining itself. Sometimes it lets things fizzle, like how a missing-family plot plays out, added at the end of the second act; the movie’s villains also struggle to build a proper air of intimidation despite what they symbolize. And in other cases, “Blacklight” simply accepts being incomprehensible. The latter is especially the case with its action, which has a decent car chase involving a garbage truck to boast about, but gets far messier when it’s about Neeson exchanging bullets and punches with others. A final shootout inside a mansion, a pit of some green and orange light among darkness, is totally incomprehensible about what’s happening or where it is.
The film comes with an extra burn because these ruminations about blind loyalty, of men trying to be good guys in the business of dishonesty, can indeed make for a good Neeson action movie. Williams proved that with his more accomplished, previous Neeson vehicle “Honest Thief,” in which he plays a safecracker who wants to get clean by confessing to the authorities, so he can live in peace with the new love of his life. There’s a moral edge to “Honest Thief” that Williams wants to carry into “Blacklight,” especially as the bar for a good modern Neeson actioner is getting lower and lower. But “Blacklight” shows us so little that we haven’t seen in sharper slices of paranoia. [D+]
“Blacklight” arrives in theaters on February 11.