Liam Neeson stars in the action thriller “Retribution.”

Liam Neeson has carved out a surprising niche as an action star since 2008’s “Taken” and has continued churning out an incredible amount of fastpaced, big- and mid-budget, shoot-em-up movies. His latest, “Retribution,” is an English language version of Spain’s “El Desconocido,” and it lacks the edge-of-your-seat thrills we’ve not only come to expect from the star’s second act but also any kind of heartbeat at its core to keep the audience’s hearts pumping in the action. This remake for American audiences is banking on its star’s flip to action hero to lure in viewers, but they are in for disappointment.

Director Nimród Antal takes Neeson and a bland and obvious script adapted by Chris Salmanpour that feels more like it was thrown into Google Translate and then finished off with incredibly heavy-handed exposition. Antal then adds extreme and awkwardly long closeups and shaky cam effects for something that on paper ticks all those modern action flick boxes but falls devastatingly short on the finished product.

Neeson plays Matt Turner, a workaholic investment banker living, aloofly, with his wife, Heather (Embeth Davidtz), and two teenage children, Zach and Emily (Jack Champion and Lily Aspell), in Berlin. One morning while taking kids to school he finds a burner phone in the car and is alerted to the fact he is literally sitting on a bomb and if he gets out of the car it will explode.

From here it is anyone’s guess whose distorted voice it is on the other end of the line or why they are doing this, especially after they direct Matt around town, witnessing another bombing of a colleague then directing them to other places, like an interactive Waze. The only thing Matt seems to want, besides to not blow up, is to understandably get his kids out of the car, but the voice won’t let that happen either.

Neeson is thereby stuck in the driver’s seat, and Antal uses every chance he gets to focus on the once strictly dramatic actor to show that he does still possess those chops. However, with such a wooden script, it’s hard even for the man who played Oskar Schindler to polish it. The rest of the cast does what they can, but it feels like they were given the minimum in terms of direction. Even Matthew Modine and Noma Sumezweni, who play Matt’s boss and the Interpol cop on the bombing trail, respectively, are relegated to one note throughout.

“Retribution” doesn’t even have the decency to be abhorrently bad or banal. Instead, it just kind of exists and will waft in and out of theaters like a stench on the wind.

My biggest issue is that there could have been more to it than we got. Thankfully it clocks in at a cool 91 minutes but there are so many missed opportunities where something juicier could be mined or at least something more exciting than Liam Neeson driving relatively safely through Berlin in an almost glorified Mercedes ad. And the film seems to think so, too, by focusing on things that never pan out to be anything more than a passing reference or a thought that goes nowhere. But that feels typical of these kinds of action/thrillers of the last 10 to 20 years. Even though we’re met with a “John Wick” or a “Quiet Place” occasionally, these mid-budget films don’t thrill like they used to.

Where a mid-tier, largely contained thriller like this could have done really well back in the ‘80s or ‘90s (look at “Conspiracy Theory,” “Face Off” or “The Rock”) with almost everything from serious to campy concepts, banking on star power and full of everything you want in a thrilling summer flick. Today it seems to have passed over, along with other genres of mid-budget movies, for the nostalgia grabs or superhero blockbusters. If you look up articles on mid-budget films in general, you get entertainment journalists both lamenting the death of such things and celebrating their return.

“Retribution” certainly has the star power behind Liam Neeson. He has proven he can be angry and vengeful in this second phase of his career (though apparently, he doesn’t like that phraseology). He can equally showcase his acting capabilities that remain from the first. But the film lacks the heart that we had in those movies of yore: the fun moments that counterbalance the seriousness without taking away from it, the high-octane stunts or cleverly wound plots that kept the audience enthralled.

This film, unfortunately, spins out on all fronts.

“Retribution”

91 minutes

Rated R for some language and violence

1.5 stars