Retribution (2023)

Plot of Retribution: Matt Turner, the head of a hedge fund, argues with his wife before getting his rebellious son and younger daughter into his  Mercedes SUV and start off towards their school in Berlin. On the way he finds an unknown mobile phone in the car and when contacted finds that his car has a bomb under the seats. So no-one can move or they will be blown up. The unknown voice insists that his wife is contacted and goes to a safe deposit box to withdraw $50,000, subsequently being arrested. Matt is directed to places in Berlin where  there are other people connected to him, including his partner in the hedge fund all of them being blown up, leading the police to think that Matt is the villain of the piece. The objective the voice in the phone is to get Matt and his partner to release $105 million in a contingency fund in Dubai to him. Will he be successful?

Content: No sex or nudity, of drinking or smoking or drug taking. Matt argues with his wife about who is going to take the kids to school and gives in. The children are rebellious particularly the elder son Zach. We are told later that she is visiting a divorce lawyer. We are also told that Matt’s hedge fund is in trouble, causing him to be distracted. Once the villain is on the phone we spend all the time inside the Mercedes SUV. Matt is directed to places where he can see people being blown up. At one point he is confronted by his partner Anders in another vehicle – a Maserati – and the voice tells Matt to shoot him. Matt is unable to do so and the partner’s car is blown up. The police steadily home in on the Mercedes and eventually cut phone contact in Berlin and find that the children can be recovered after taking the doors off the Merc. Matt drives off after agreeing on a face to face meeting with the voice.

A View: No-one does pained father quite like Liam Neeson and the requirement that the whole film be viewed from within the car was an interesting conceit, these two things making it quite watchable although I thought there were some serious plot holes. I suppose this outing is typical of those which require the villain of the piece to be capable of the most extraordinary feats, in this case fitting a number of vehicles with bombs, all of them capable of activation if pressure is removed from the driver’s seat. How did he do this without getting blown up himself, within an acceptable time frame? But it rolls along, so it is one of those films which you can have on while doing something else.

Fun Fact: This movie only garnered two items for the IMDb trivia.