Memory (2022)

Martin Campbell's Memory arrives with the solemn bearing of a late-career Liam Neeson thriller and the actual substance of one. Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a contract killer in El Paso whose early-onset Alzheimer's is less a condition than a plot device with a countdown timer. The disease is treated as tragedy, not identity, which spares us any therapeutic framing of cognitive decline as a facet of selfhood to be celebrated. It is simply a man forgetting where he left the evidence, and then dying for it. There is something almost restful in that.

The film's social conscience is present but modest, the sort of thing a studio might mention in a press release and then forget. The cast is diverse in the ordinary way that casts are diverse now, with Taj Atwal, Harold Torres, and Ray Fearon appearing as professionals rather than symbols. Monica Bellucci runs a crime family with cold efficiency, and a female FBI agent exists without a speech about glass ceilings. The villain is a wealthy family that uses money and purchased police to bury a child's assault, which gestures toward a class critique without committing to one. A trafficking subplot provides stakes, not sermons. Nobody in this film stops to explain the moral of it.

We are left with a competent, glum thriller that critics received with a shrug, and the shrug is understandable. It wants to be about memory and instead is about a flash drive. The progressive gestures are faint enough to be mistaken for set dressing, and that is their character. This is not a film with a message. It is a film with a plot, a star, and a mild, inherited awareness of the world it is set in. We grade accordingly.