Blacklight (2022)

Blacklight arrives as a Liam Neeson action thriller in which the star, now firmly in his late-period mode of weary men answering phones with visible reluctance, plays an off-the-books FBI fixer who stumbles into a conspiracy reaching the highest echelons of power. The film grossed roughly sixteen million dollars against a forty-three million dollar budget and earned an eleven percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which places it in a category of cultural artifact we might call the contractual obligation. The plot concerns a political activist named Sofia Flores, who speaks at a Washington rally about women's and racial equality and is promptly killed in a hit-and-run, an event that sets a journalist and a reluctant enforcer on a collision course with a secret program called Operation Unity. It is a paranoid thriller assembled from parts of better paranoid thrillers.

The social content is present but modest. Sofia's rally speech gestures toward gender and racial equality, and her death functions as the inciting incident, though the film treats her politics as a device to be avenged instead of a thesis to be argued. Emmy Raver-Lampman's Mira Jones is a capable, persistent journalist who does the investigative heavy lifting, and the ensemble places a Black co-lead and a Latina activist inside a story that otherwise belongs to a sixty-nine-year-old man in a trench coat. The gestures are real. They are also brief, and the film's energy resides almost entirely in car chases and gunfights.

Villainy here is governmental, not corporate, which keeps the picture clear of any economic critique. There is no environmental concern, no body politics, no neurodivergent character, no queer subtext, and no revision of the historical record. What remains is a serviceable, forgettable thriller that gestures toward social awareness the way a man gestures toward a door he has no intention of walking through.