The Marksman

Eastwood's former 1st AD-turned-director Robert Lorenz leads with an uncluttered visual style, a respect for his characters framed in juxtaposition with the land that would make his former boss proud.

While that stuff might be new to this guy, we've seen it all before.

This is a ponderous slog of a tale that rarely achieves anything close to a lasting impact.

As a bare-minimum action flick, The Marksman is mostly serviceable.

A Clint Eastwood reject.

Not a great movie, but courtesy of director Robert Lorenz, a lean, plausibly entertaining one with all the fixin's and none of the extra flab of deep, incisive meaning.

Yes, Liam Neeson phones it in once again, but at least it's a decent conversation.

Just as reliably as the swallows migrate annually to Capistrano, audiences can expect Liam Neeson to regularly show up in a movie that finds him beating the living hell out of various villains.

Neeson has used his charismatic presence to single-handedly rescue some boilerplate action movies from the scrap heap, but The Marksman is not one of them.

Shifts into clumsily-done "Liam Neeson growls and murders" action scenes that nobody involved seems to have quite known how to make, or perhaps they just didn't care.