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‘Memory’ Review: Michel Franco Gets Unforgettable Performances From Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard

The tough art-house director of 'After Lucia' and 'Sundown' applies his rigorous style to a more optimistic story, presenting an unconventional romance between two damaged-goods New Yorkers.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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“ Memory ” feels like the “Silver Linings Playbook” of Michel Franco ’s career: an unexpectedly accessible romance between two damaged human beings, from an independent director who’s been known to put characters through some of life’s most punishing indignities. For those familiar with Franco’s work, the previous film it most resembles is “Chronic,” though the tough-love auteur spares us the bummer ending this time around. In that movie, he followed a hospice nurse through his rounds, then abruptly cut to black when the guy was sideswiped by a car. Womp-womp. When a director does that early in his career, audiences are right to be wary.

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“Memory” introduces Sylvia in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. She’s 13 years sober, the same age as her daughter, Sara (Brooke Timber). Sylvia has fashioned her life in a way that gives her control over the things she can. Resisting the kind of clumsy exposition where people describe their backstory (which might have easily fit into that AA meeting), Franco prefers to reveal his characters through action. Sylvia works at an adult daycare center and keeps her social life to a minimum, compulsively setting the security alarm each time she enters her Brooklyn apartment. She’s hyper-vigilant about Sara’s behavior, forbidding the teenager to be around alcohol or boys.

Long before Sylvia explains her history of assault, her behavior says a lot about her own teenage experience. No wonder she’s creeped out when Saul follows her home from the reunion. But she’s also sharp enough to notice that something’s not quite right about this man, surely drawing on her training as a social worker. After Sylvia’s stalker spends the night on her stoop, she contacts his guardian, Isaac (Josh Lucas), and discovers Saul’s dementia.

Meanwhile, Sylvia’s sister (Merritt Wever) points out that the timing doesn’t line up: The girls transferred to a different school before Saul arrived, making it unlikely that he molested her. Strange that Sylvia’s memory sees it differently. What else might she be confused about? (Her estranged mother, played by ’70s cult icon Jessica Harper, accuses Sylvia of lying. But it’s just as likely that the older woman is in some kind of denial.)

So far, the film could be accused of being rather schematic — of setting up a situation where audiences must decide whether to believe the victim or to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused. Then the characters’ behavior steers “Memory” in an unexpected direction. Isaac asks Sylvia if she’d be willing to be a nurse to Saul, and she agrees. At this point, it’s not clear whether she sincerely intends to help or has some kind of revenge on her mind. Franco resists the reductive path, allowing these two lonely people to bond. Both are fussed over by family members with a tendency to infantilize them. Sylvia’s kid sister assumes the more responsible role, while Saul’s brother has conservator-like control over his charge. Later, we discover what happens when he’s left alone.

Reviewed at Sunset Screening Room, Sept. 5, 2023. In Venice, Toronto film festivals. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: (U.S.-Mexico-Chile) A Teorema, High Frequency Entertainment, MUBI production, in association with Screen Capital, Caste Study Films. (World sales: The Match Factory, Cologne, Germany.) Producers: Michel Franco, Eréndira Núñez Larios, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery. Executive producers: Paula P. Manzanedo, Moises Chiver, Jack Selby, Patricio Rabuffetti, Tatiana Emden, Joyce Zylberberg, Ralph Haiek, Michael Weber, Efe Cakarel, Bobby Allen, Jason Ropell.
• Crew: Director, writer: Michel Franco. Camera: Yves Cape. Editor:
• With: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles.

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Liam neeson in ‘memory’: film review.

Guy Pearce co-stars as an FBI agent in a remake of a Belgian crime thriller involving a child trafficking ring and a hitman struggling with Alzheimer’s.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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The premise of Memory just might be the mother of all high concepts: A hired assassin has Alzheimer’s. It instantly evokes two possible interpretations: bruising black comedy would be one, thoughtful musing on life and death the other. In especially deft hands, a third option would meld the two. As directed by Martin Campbell from a screenplay by Dario Scardapane, and even with a couple of soulful actors at its center, that premise plays out as none of the above; it’s a mechanical plot point in a perfunctory actioner that leaves laughs — intentional ones, anyway — and existential meditations by the wayside.

Adapting the 2003 Belgian feature The Memory of a Killer , based on the novel De Zaak Alzheimer ( The Alzheimer Case ), Memory comes equipped with all the accoutrements of the contract-killer genre: the burner phones, the silencers, the laser sights, the Liam Neeson . This time, though, Neeson isn’t the law-and-order guy wielding questionable methods in the name of justice, but the mercenary who is faced with an unacceptable assignment — his target is a 13-year-old girl — and trying to do the right thing before his dimming cognitive lights go out permanently.

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Release date: Friday, April 29

Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Ray Stevenson, Harold Torres

Director: Martin Campbell

Screenwriter: Dario Scardapane

To believe, as we’re meant to, that Neeson’s Alex Lewis spent his formative years in El Paso, Texas, where most of the action is set, would require its own cognitive disconnect. Then again, the production was shot mainly in Bulgaria, and there’s a vaguely intercontinental, pan-European vibe to the cast, from small supporting roles to Monica Bellucci ’s spiritless rendering of a villainous bigwig.

But the Lone Star State is meant to be more than a state of mind in Memory . It’s meant to put a topical slant on a storyline involving the abuse and trafficking of children. The teenager who Alex refuses to kill is an undocumented immigrant; a detention center for such children proves to be a vicious nexus of public and private interests; and the real-life unsolved murders of countless girls and women in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, haunts and drives a key character.

For all its questions of morality, mortality and politics, the film feels empty at its core, not unlike the sleek modern spaces where the story’s ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt and ultra-clichéd scheme and cavort joylessly. Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell ( Casino Royale , The Protégé ) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

As the movie opens, Alex pulls off a hit of gruesome expertise in a Guadalajara hospital, a scene that’s mirrored, with even more blood, in the film’s final stretch. However ruthless a killing machine Alex may be, his humanizing predicament becomes clear when, returning to his car after dispatching his victim, he struggles for a painful moment to remember where he put his car key. The pills he takes are designed to forestall the inevitable, and to help maintain an even keel he scrawls factoids on his inner forearm for easy reference. Neeson signals Alex’s frustration and his acknowledgment of defeat. He’s ready to quit this crazy business, a decision that his Mexico City contact Mauricio (Lee Boardman) rejects, hoisting a fat envelope of cash at him with instructions to kill two people in El Paso, a town Alex knows well.

After dispatching target No. 1, a well-to-do businessman (Scot Williams), and retrieving an item from his safe, Alex discovers that the second would-be victim is 13-year-old Beatriz (Mia Sanchez). With his customary violence, he lets his smarmy local handler (Daniel de Bourg) know that he wants the contract canceled, setting off a new round of cat-and-mouse in which he’s the quarry.

FBI agent Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce ), meanwhile, has taken a particular interest in Beatriz, who was being pimped by her father (Antonio Jaramillo) and is now orphaned, after a sting by Vincent’s team, the agency’s Child Exploitation Task Force, goes spectacularly wrong. Vincent’s boss, Gerald Nussbaum (Ray Fearon), puts the task force on ice and sends Mexican investigator Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres) packing. But Hugo finds a reason to stick around, and neither Vincent nor his partner, Linda Amisted (Taj Atwal), is eager to pivot to run-of-the-mill local crimes. An El Paso detective (Ray Stevenson) isn’t thrilled to have them around, and Alex, in his last-ditch pursuit of truth and justice, is one step ahead of them all. If only he can remember where he put that flash drive filled with incriminating audio.

Scardapane (producer-writer of the series The Bridge and The Punisher ) advances the story via information drops posing as conversation. Case in point: “You realize we’re talking about one of the most powerful real estate moguls in the country, right?” Bellucci’s Davana Sealman, the mogul in question, pulls many puppet strings in the city, a power that her hedonistic son (Josh Taylor) depends on. The pileup of one-note characters also includes a prostitute (Stella Stocker) working the bar at Alex’s hotel, and a trophy-wife stereotype (Natalie Anderson) who feels like something out of a subpar Raymond Chandler knockoff, or an unintended spoof of one.

The involvement of Pearce is a wink and a nod to his role in a classic of the memory-affliction subgenre, Memento , a taut and masterful thriller in whose shadow Memory withers. Pearce is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and his performance is the strongest, most sustained and convincing element of the film — and one that frequently finds him in a vacuum.

He enters the story delivering a performance within a performance: In the attempted sting, Vincent poses as a john seeking the company of an underage girl. Even after he’s shaken off the layers of scuzz required for that role, there’s something off about Vincent, a sense that he’s uncared for. The explanation arrives in an eleventh-hour revelation that should be crushing in its sadness but is instead awkward in its narrative ineptitude.

To give that disclosure its intended impact, Campbell would have had to stir up certain undercurrents in the characters who interact with Vincent. Atwal comes closest in a final exchange that, against the odds in a movie that can feel propelled by an algorithm, produces a satisfying emotional zing.

However unsubtle the material, Neeson offers unforced glimmers of a soul lost to brutality as Alex wavers between a thickening mental fog and perfect lucidity when the plot demands it. But there’s also a sense of his effortless screen magnetism being shoehorned into a thriller boilerplate. And it’s tempting to imagine, when Alex is staring into the middle distance, forgetting where he is and why, that Neeson might be remembering when he played complex men like Alfred Kinsey and Michael Collins.

Full credits

Distributors: Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films Production companies: Black Bear Pictures, Welle Entertainment, Saville Productions Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Ray Stevenson, Harold Torres, Josh Taylor, Antonio Jaramillo, Daniel De Bourg, Scot Williams, Stella Stocker, Rebecca Calder, Atanas Srebrev, Lee Boardman, Natalie Anderson, Mia Sanchez Director: Martin Campbell Screenwriter: Dario Scardapane Based on the book De Zaak Alzheimer by Jef Geeraerts and on the picture De Zaak Alzheimer by Carl Joos and Erik Van Looy Producers: Cathy Schulman, Moshe Diamant, Rupert Maconick, Michael Heimler, Arthur Sarkissian Executive producers: Teddy Schwarzman, Ben Stillman, Peter Bouckaert, Rudy Durand, Tom Ortenberg, James Masciello, Matthew Sidari Director of photography: David Tattersall Production designer: Wolf Kroeger Costume designer: Irina Kotcheva Editor: Jo Francis Music: Rupert Parkes Casting: Pam Dixon, Dan Hubbard

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Review: In ‘Memory,’ two survivors come to a wary bond, even if the past harbors demons

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A guarded Jessica Chastain and a rumpled Peter Sarsgaard make mysterious, sweetly dissonant music together in “Memory,” a touch-and-go drama about connection that’s as steeped in discomfort as it is cautiously hopeful about one’s ability to find peace within it.

Writer-director Michel Franco’s take on an offbeat urban romance — between a social worker and a cognitively impaired, housebound man — has no use for easy or overwrought emotions or snap conclusions. Franco’s story implies that to really see someone on the inside is hard work. And doing so when nobody around you trusts your eyesight, much less your judgment? Even harder.

When we meet Chastain’s Sylvia, she’s the back of a head in a darkly lighted AA meeting. Members heap praise on her for how she’s handled her struggle across 13 years of sobriety, a span of time that corresponds to the age of her daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber), also in tow.

In the outside world, where she works in adult day care and lives in a tightly secured apartment, Sylvia’s manner is hard-edged and solitary — and when it comes to Anna, who enjoys hanging out with her aunt Olivia ( Merritt Wever ) and same-age cousins, as watchful as a hawk. Silvia looks ill at ease around her extended family, or is it just anyone who’s not her daughter?

Her unease palpably becomes ours, though, when she’s followed home from her high school reunion by a shaggy-looking attendee who then camps outside her building overnight in the pouring rain. Gentle-seeming but clearly not well, Saul (Sarsgaard) is picked up the next morning by his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), which is when we learn that the former suffers from dementia and lives unsupervised in his brownstone, occasionally looked after by Isaac and an adoring niece ( Elsie Fisher ).

Healing, connection, optimism’: Peter Sarsgaard takes ‘Memory’ beyond the dementia

“I find it so gratifying that people are emotional watching this. They have a feeling of unity and optimism,” the actor says.

Dec. 20, 2023

Sylvia, however, is convinced that smiling, polite Saul is actually a figure from her traumatic childhood who recognized her that night. When she initiates a follow-up visit, the gesture appears charitable but comes with a pent-up confrontation in mind. In its clarifying wake, however, a tenderness develops between these damaged souls, one that becomes increasingly difficult to understand for their respective families — including the mother Sylvia won’t speak to, for reasons that become disturbingly clear as things combust in the final act. (Even before we know what we suspect, Jessica Harper ’s few scenes vividly suggest a manipulative affluence worth purging.)

Franco is a cool-headed ironist with a flair for oblique narrative and a fascination with the detached worlds of the wealthy. In taut, violent oddities of disintegration like “New Order” and “Sundown,” his style can translate into a bracing, compelling distance that’s not for all tastes. But because “Memory” is, at root, a story of people finding each other, the vibe is more reminiscent of Franco’s caretaking character study “Chronic,” while still touching on the abiding peculiarities of people who come from money and what’s always simmering in broken people. More directly than his previous films, his penchant for long takes with minimal intercutting seeds an emotional suspense, for us as well as the fragile humans inside cinematographer Yves Cape’s cool, steady frame.

Chastain and Sarsgaard use that time and space well too, playing out what’s unspoken and making real their characters’ budding, unsentimental closeness. There are whole areas of this twosome’s bond that remain unexplained. Ultimately, that feels like a virtue of the movie, rather than a flaw.

Franco’s way with a heartfelt story means foregrounding a feral alertness to danger to get us to appreciate the warmth its protagonists are waiting to bestow. But it’s also what’s admirably adult about “Memory.” It’s a movie that understands fully how nothing about our lives is a given, and that if you look hard enough at yours, there’s always something worth escaping from and running toward.

Rating: R, for some sexual content, language and graphic nudity Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Playing: AMC Century City 15

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Two strangers grapple with hazy 'Memory' in this unsettling film

Justin Chang

Jessica Chastain plays a single mother who connects with a man with early-onset dementia (Peter Sarsgaard) in Memory . via Ketchup Entertainment hide caption

Jessica Chastain plays a single mother who connects with a man with early-onset dementia (Peter Sarsgaard) in Memory .

The Mexican writer-director Michel Franco is something of a feel-bad filmmaker. His style can be chilly and severe. His characters are often comfortable bourgeois types who are in for some class-based comeuppance. His usual method is to set up the camera at a distance from his characters and watch them squirm in tense, unbroken long takes.

Sometimes all hell breaks loose, as in Franco's dystopian drama New Order , about a mass revolt in Mexico City. Sometimes the nightmare takes hold more quietly, like in Sundown , his recent slow-burn thriller about a vacation gone wrong.

I haven't always been a fan of Franco's work, not because I object to pessimistic worldviews in art, but because his shock tactics have sometimes felt cheap and derivative, borrowed from other filmmakers. But his new English-language movie, Memory , is something of a surprise. For starters, it's fascinating to see how well-known American actors like Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard adapt to his more detached style of filmmaking. And while his touch is as clinical and somber as ever, there's a sense of tenderness and even optimism here that feels new to his work.

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'femininity is not weakness,' jessica chastain says of 'zookeeper's wife'.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a single mom who works at an adult daycare center. From the moment we meet her, at an AA meeting where people congratulate her on her many years of sobriety, it's clear that she's been through a lot. She's intensely protective of her teenage daughter, rarely letting her hang out with other kids, especially boys. Whenever she returns home to her Brooklyn apartment, she immediately locks the door behind her and sets the home security system. Even when Sylvia's doing nothing, we see the tension in her body, as if she were steeling herself against the next blow.

One night, while attending her high school reunion, Sylvia is approached by a man named Saul, played by Sarsgaard. He says nothing, but his silent attentiveness unnerves Sylvia, especially when he follows her home and spends the night camped outside her apartment. The next morning, Sylvia learns more about Saul that might help explain his disturbing behavior: He has early-onset dementia and suffers regular short-term memory loss.

Some of the backstory in Memory is confusing by design. Sylvia remembers being sexually abused by a 17-year-old student named Ben when she was 12, and she initially accuses Saul of having abused her too. We soon learn that he couldn't have, because they were at school at different times. It would seem that Sylvia's own memory, clouded by personal pain, isn't entirely reliable either.

Despite the awkwardness and tension of these early encounters, Sylvia and Saul are clearly drawn to each other. Seeing how well Saul responds to Sylvia's company, his family offers her a part-time job looking after him during the day. As their connection deepens, they realize how much they have in common. Both Sylvia and Saul feel like outcasts. Both, too, have issues with their families; Saul's brother, played by Josh Charles, treats him like a nuisance and a child. And while Sylvia is close to her younger sister, nicely played by Merritt Wever, she's been estranged for years from their mother, who refuses to believe her allegations of sexual abuse.

The movie poignantly suggests that Sylvia and Saul are two very different people who, by chance, have come into each other's lives at just the right moment. At the same time, the story does come uncomfortably close to romanticizing dementia, as if Saul's air of friendly, unthreatening bafflement somehow made him the perfect boyfriend.

But while I have some reservations about how the movie addresses trauma and illness, this is one case where Franco's restraint actually works: There's something admirably evenhanded about how he observes these characters trying to navigate uncharted waters in real time. Chastain and Sarsgaard are very moving here; it's touching to see how the battle-hardened Sylvia responds to Saul's gentle spirit, and how he warms to her patience and attention.

This isn't the first time Franco has focused on the act of caregiving; more than once I was reminded of his 2015 drama, Chronic , which starred Tim Roth as a palliative care worker. I didn't love that movie, either, but it had some of the same unsettling intimacy and emotional force as Memory . It's enough to make me want to revisit some of Franco's work, with newly appreciative eyes.

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‘Memory’ Review: Getting Too Old for This

In this action thriller, Liam Neeson plays an assassin struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not as interesting as it sounds.

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By Lena Wilson

The premise of “Memory,” the latest action thriller from the “Casino Royale” director Martin Campbell, is fascinating: Liam Neeson plays Alex Lewis, an aging assassin struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. As Alex seeks vengeance against a child trafficking operation in El Paso, he becomes increasingly unpredictable to the F.B.I. team tracking him, led by the contemplative agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce). Unique premise aside, “Memory” is an absurd slog. Its plot clichés and wooden performances are far more enduring than its narrative.

This is a remake of the 2005 Belgian film “The Memory of a Killer,” which was a critical success. “Memory,” then, is yet another embarrassing American adaptation. It plays as if the worst episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” have all been processed in a blender and then stretched to nearly two hours long. The script, by Dario Scardapane, is threadbare in some parts and redundant in others. Its treatment of female characters is, at best, bleak. There are multiple pauses for eye roll-inducing genre fare, like a violent police interrogation or a shot of the grizzled Agent Serra staring out a window and drinking Scotch. The American characters are performed almost entirely by British or Australian actors, a choice that might be less noticeable in a film not set in Texas.

Neeson is fine and gets to hit his standard action movie beats, like growling out threats and bedding a much younger woman. But he’s also surprisingly underutilized — the film shifts focus to Agent Serra early on, leaving Alex and his disability to languish in the shadows. Whatever appeal this film had in its original iteration has been sapped out, leaving a story that, when not completely vexing, is either mind-numbing or hilarious by accident.

Memory Rated R for bullets in brains and damsels in distress. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

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Noirish ‘Memory’ is a cut above the average Liam Neeson action flick

A hit man with Alzheimer’s disease develops a conscience when he’s hired to kill a 13-year-old girl

There’s a sameness to many of the roles Liam Neeson takes these days. With a few notable recent exceptions that still prove his depth and range — “ Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House ,” “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ,” “ Ordinary Love ” — the Oscar-nominated star of “ Schindler’s List ” has lately become more associated with action thrillers in which he plays a certain type: an emotionally damaged, perhaps even demon-driven antihero/loner plagued by alcoholism, an ethically compromised past, grief or some other psychic pain whose quest for redemption has turned him into an avenging angel. The quality of these films fluctuates between satisfying and disappointing, for the same reason. Because Neeson is so adept at rendering this stock character, he doesn’t always work very hard at it. Sometimes that effortlessness is a pleasure, and sometimes it just feels lazy.

Liam Neeson, a beloved action star who can pack an emotional punch

In plot, at least, “Memory” is no exception. Based on the 1985 novel “De Zaak Alzheimer” by Belgian writer Jef Geeraerts and its 2003 Belgian film adaptation, “The Memory of a Killer,” Neeson’s latest genre exercise centers on a hit man with dementia who suddenly sprouts a conscience when one of the targets he’s been hired to kill turns out to be a 13-year-old girl. And yet “Memory” is a cut above average, for this sort of thing. Mostly that’s thanks to the direction of Martin Campbell (“ Casino Royale ”), who injects the same freshness of energy into this formulaic outing that he did with last year’s assassin thriller “ The Protege .”

“Memory” feels more like film noir — deliciously dark, cynical and slightly amoral — than a pulpy piece of rote storytelling.

Neeson, for one thing, isn’t really the good guy here, or really even the bad guy with a heart of gold. His Alex Lewis is a coldblooded killer. With one exception — the barely teenage prostitute (Mia Sanchez) Alex refuses to kill after he’s hired to kill a couple of people to cover up a child-exploitation ring — he has few qualms about whom he murders. Cops, in particular, are so much collateral damage in Alex’s single-minded mission to take out the members of the international sex-trafficking cartel. The fact that he’s starting to lose his memory, and must write reminders down on his forearm with a Sharpie, barely makes him more sympathetic.

It’s a weird feeling, not being able to root wholeheartedly for Neeson. But I kind of like it. It feels honest, and less pandering.

Some cops, however, are spared. Two members of the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force (Guy Pearce and Taj Atwal), along with a Mexican detective (Harold Torres) on loan to the FBI, are allowed to live so they can perform cleanup on the messy pile of corpses Alex leaves behind in his path of vengeance. Mostly, as Pearce’s Agent Vincent Serra observes, that entails “taking out” the traffickers whom Vincent and the task force aren’t legally able to execute, while leaving the feds a trail of “breadcrumbs.”

Vincent’s pursuit of Alex, while following those breadcrumbs, is the engine that drives the plot. (The casting of Pearce, who in 2001’s “ Memento ” played an amnesiac pursuing his wife’s killer while marking his own body with clues, is a nice sort of callback.)

“Memory” is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind. That’s the film’s mix of moral ambiguity and the regret of someone for whom it’s too late to undo the past, but not perhaps to rectify the present, even when the law can’t. In the words of Vincent: “Memory’s a mother-f---er. And as for justice, it ain’t guaranteed.”

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, some bloody images, brief nudity, mature thematic elements and coarse language throughout. 114 minutes.

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In Memory, Liam Neeson Gets to Act More Than Usual

Even those of us who’ve generally enjoyed Liam Neeson’s recent run of tough-guy roles sometimes forget that he can be a hell of a performer, too. His latest, Memory , directed by action legend Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale , The Mask of Zorro ), offers a helpful reminder that Neeson kicking ass need not mean Neeson on acting autopilot. The film, a remake of the 2003 Belgian thriller The Memory of a Killer , follows a hitman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, but the dementia element is more a narrative contrivance than a serious exploration of a debilitating illness. (For that, you might want to check out Gaspar Noé’s Vortex instead, also out this week.) But Neeson, who had been an intensely physical actor even before he started playing guys with special sets of skills, conveys the vulnerability, pain, and fear of the character so well that he turns a nothing plot element into something genuinely moving.

When we first meet Alex Lewis (Neeson), he’s posing as a nurse in order to brutally strangle a man visiting his sick mother in the hospital. Our hero is not a good guy: Alex has spent his life killing people for money, often at the behest of gangsters operating in and around El Paso, Texas. But when he’s given a job that involves targeting a young girl, he refuses to kill her. Is this a sign of a humanity he’s always had, or is it a newfound hesitancy brought on by his condition? “You’re going soft,” his boss, Mauricio (Lee Boardman), says, bitterly.

A greater conspiracy is unfolding, however. The girl, Beatriz (Mia Sanchez), was a child-trafficking victim, and a dogged FBI agent, Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce, who himself starred in Memento 22 years ago, a film to which Memory occasionally nods), is hoping she will be the witness to help him take down a massive human-trafficking operation. The conspiracy, however, reaches through the upper levels of El Paso society, including the family of local businesswoman and philanthropist Davana Sealman (Monica Bellucci). While Serra and his partners, among whom is Hugo Marquez (Harold Torres) of the Mexican intelligence agency, encounter obstacles legal and otherwise, Alex seems to be the one person who can cut through all that red tape — a deadly lone wolf with what is now a personal grudge and not a lot of time left.

That results in an intriguing confusion of loyalties that the film probably could have done more with; Serra and his crew are torn over whether to try and stop Alex or to let him work his killing-machine magic. But overall, Memory works not so much as a procedural — it’s a bit too simply plotted for that — as it does as a character study. Credit the actors, and director Campbell’s willingness to give them their space. Neeson, in particular, is well-suited to portray Alex’s growing fragility. When he wakes up in the middle of the night, haunted by the images of people he may or may not have killed, his fear and confusion are overwhelming. The actor has always had a thing for suffering; even his action movies are on some level about shame and regret and intense personal pain . But what was submerged in the previous movies is out in the open this time. One scene where Alex cauterizes a bullet wound in his torso with a bottle of liquor and a lighter is so agonizing that I’d believe it if you told me Neeson had actually burned himself.

There’s an interesting edge to the action, too. Alex smashes heads and blows away people (not all of them bad guys, either) with ruthless, automatic efficiency, but it all feels reflexive, as if it’s been programmed into his muscle memory. That speaks to why he’s able to keep offing people even as he seems to be losing his cognitive abilities. He’s been killing for so long that it comes as naturally to him as breathing. That makes for a compelling contrast: On the one hand, we get surprisingly effective and visceral violence — the genre spectacle at which Campbell has always excelled — and on the other, a very real tenderness and anguish that’s quite rare in this sort of flick. In the end, Memory ’s greatest asset might be that it knows exactly what it is — a fun combination of sleazoid action and surprising emotion. It’s the best kind of B-movie.

• movie review
• liam neeson
• martin campbell
• alzheimer's disease
• memory of a killer
• monica bellucci

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‘Memory’ Review: Liam Neeson Plays a Senile Hitman in a Dull Sex Trafficking Thriller

David ehrlich.

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At a time when each new Liam Neeson action thriller has become utterly indistinguishable from the last, Martin Campbell ’s “ Memory ” would at least seem to have a unique hook: In this one, the lanky Irishman plays a contract killer who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Surely that should be enough to help the latest page in the Redbox chapter of Neeson’s career stand out from the likes of “The Ice Road,” “The Marksman,” and the rest of the post-“Taken” glut.

Mix in Monica Bellucci as the Jeffrey Epstein-esque queenpin of a child prostitution ring, Guy Pearce — no stranger to stories about anterograde amnesia — as a mustached FBI agent prone to wearily saying things like “Memory’s a motherfucker,” and pliable source material (the 2003 Belgian thriller “The Alzheimer Case”) that’s enriched by its new setting along Texas’ southern border, and it sounds like the recipe for a solid little programmer. It sounds like the kind of C+ B-movie that’s just good enough to convince you that Neeson still has some skin in the game. “Memory” even boasts a last-minute cameo from America’s sweetheart, Jake Tapper!

Sure enough, the opening sequence alone offers more bang for your buck than the entirety of February’s “Blacklight.” It starts with grizzled hitman Alex Lewis (Neeson) disguising himself as a nurse at a Guadalajara hospital, murdering some young doofus with piano wire while the victim’s intubated mother helplessly watches from her bed, and then fleeing the scene in an Oldsmobile station wagon. It’s fun, it’s brutal, and it’s fully in command of Neeson’s screen image as a homicidal grandpa who’s killed more people than he could ever hope to remember — senile or not.

Even more promising is the seemingly unrelated scene that follows on the other side of the Rio Grande, where undercover FBI agent Vincent Serra (Pearce) rescues a preteen Mexican girl from her pimp father by posing as a customer. Serra even pays the girl a visit at the overcrowded detention center to which she’s transferred for deportation, and laments how little the law allows him to do for a child in such desperate need of help. What ties all of these characters together won’t be revealed for a very, very, very long time, but layering their introductions on top of each other seems to anticipate an unusually humane thriller that balances the mental decay of an expert hitman against the moral awakening of a useless fed.

Alas, while that is — in broad strokes — what Dario Scardapane’s convoluted screenplay attempts to do, “Memory” is indeed a motherfucker. Not only that, it’s also a perversely generic waste of an intriguing premise, as the failure of this dull and schlocky mess is made all the more frustrating (and bizarre) by the film’s apparent disinterest in Alex’s dementia. Yes, the guy can be forgetful. He’s prone to writing broad instructions for himself on his arm — not quite “shoot person in face,” but close — and at one point he orders an iced tea mere seconds after one is served to him. Alex knows, having watched his brother deteriorate from the same condition, that things are only going to get worse from here, and that motivates him to retire from a business that people only tend to leave in a bodybag.

And yet, Alex’s failing memory is often dramatized as a more general kind of incompetence; he doesn’t seem like a sick hitman so much as a bad one. He forgets to put the firing pin back into a pistol. He downloads sensitive client information onto a thumb drive. He spectacularly fails to protect a nice sex worker from getting shot in the neck, despite the fact that she spent the night with him for free — even the rusty killer George Clooney’s played in “The American” was able to keep that cliché alive! One genuinely fraught moment, in which Alex mistakenly assumes that he murdered the innocent child whose death is splashed across the local news, isn’t enough to salvage a character whose failing memory is less a poignant source of personal urgency than an occasional trick of narrative convenience.

Triggered by his refusal to shoot the same girl who Serra rescues from the clutches of Belluci’s human trafficking operation, Alex’s last-ditch attempt to do something good before he forgets that he can is clear enough in broad strokes, but his terminal case of atonement is handled in such clumsy fashion that even the film seems to grow bored of it. In fact, Alex may not even be the true protagonist of this story, as the jaded Serra — along with his squad of ethically ambiguous underlings, whose dialogue is so wooden that it seems like the actors are grimacing through fresh splinters with every line — gradually finds himself at the center of the action.

Although “action” might be too generous a term to describe the film’s sporadic bursts of close-up gunfire. One of them, set in an El Paso parking garage, is cleverly edited to express Alex’s growing confusion; all of them are used to punctuate an endless parade of dramatic scenes in which Serra tries to answer the various questions that Alex’s storyline has already spelled out for the audience (at least Pearce livens things up with a light Texas lilt and a well-earned frustration with America’s immigration laws). The most excitingly choreographed movement in the entire movie is a shot of two golf carts driving past each other at full-speed in the lobby of a corporate tower.

There’s a sense that Scardapane is hoping his screenplay’s parallel threads will organically knot into a noose à la “No Country for Old Men,” but it takes an entire hour of turgid setup before Alex and Serra finally cross paths, and the drama only frays apart even further when it tries to pretend these men anything to each other. “Memory is a motherfucker,” Serra reminds us, “and as for justice… it ain’t guaranteed.” But everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

Open Road Films will release “Memory” in theaters on Friday, April 29.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

• April 29, 2022
• Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis; Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra; Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman; Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora; Ray Fearon as Special Agent Gerald Nussbaum

Home Release Date

• June 21, 2022
• Martin Campbell

Distributor

• Briarcliff Entertainment

Movie Review

Where did he put the keys? They should be here under the windshield visor. That’s where he always leaves them. He wouldn’t have taken them into the hospital with him. Would he? No, no. That would be crazy. Sloppy. Bad, bad, bad.

They’re not on the seat. Not in his pants pocket. In his shirt! Yes, he put them in his scrubs’ top pocket. That’s right, he was masquerading as an orderly this time. Hospital. Scrubs. Right.

He almost forced himself to retrace his steps back through the lobby and into the room where he garroted his mark’s throat. Blood everywhere. People walking by. Bad. That would have been an amateur mistake. He never makes those. Or … he didn’t.

But things are getting worse.

Alex Lewis has long known that the decline would happen. Alzheimer’s disease has hit his whole family this way. His older brother is little more than an empty … uh, just empty at this point. For Alex, it’s only been little things: a key, a picture, a word, a note. That’s why he’s taken to writing instructions and reminders on his own arm. But for some jobs, like Alex’s, you can’t be plagued with memory loss or the threat of a rubbed-off message.

Killers can’t be losing track of things. Not even keys. In this line of work, it won’t get you fired. It’ll get you dead.

He even tried to quit. But his handler talked him out of it. “Men like us, don’t retire,” he told Alex. But what do you do when you can’t remember the address, the name, the … thingamajig any longer? What then?

Just one more job. Make it a big one. And then he’ll have enough cash to hide himself away somewhere, maybe. He’ll have to leave what’s left of his brother behind. But, hey, soon enough he’ll probably forget him anyway.

Just one last, uh … whatchamacallit. Then he’ll be fine.[ Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections. ]

Positive Elements

Alex’s next job changes everything, as he’s called upon to kill a teen girl who had been dragged into child prostitution by sex trafficking ring. Obviously, that’s not good. Alex, however, can’t force himself to follow through. But the girl is brutally murdered anyway by someone else. Alex, feeling that he’s close to losing everything anyway, takes it upon himself to hunt down those calling the shots. He also helps an FBI agent named Vincent Serra. Vincent had gone out of his way to help protect the abused girl—who was left homeless after a police sting went wrong.

Both men attempt to bring the powerbrokers behind the much larger trafficking operation to justice. Of course, their methods for doing so are much different. “We all have to die, Vincent. What’s important is what we do before we go,” Alex tells the FBI agent.

Amid a tainted justice system, we see very few good men and women. Vincent is one of a rare breed here.

Spiritual Elements

A Mexican detective wears six St. Mary medals around his neck to remind him of abused and murdered young women that he’s encountered in the course of a human trafficking case.

Someone says a prayer in Spanish and ends it with an affirmative “Amen.”

Sexual Content

We see several different women wearing open shirts or low-cut tops. One of them is in a formfitting swimsuit. Part of Vincent’s investigation into a sexual trafficking ring involves him paying, supposedly, to have sex with a man’s teen daughter. The girl undresses to a lightweight shift, but then discovers that Vincent is wearing a wire when she pulls open his shirt.

Later we see snapshots of that same teen girl being slapped by her father and a short video of her being tossed onto a bed by a shirtless older man. Later still, we see that same man at a yacht party. He strips off his clothes and lays face down on a bed and orders a different teen girl to get undressed. (She’s stopped from doing so.) The party also features an onboard hot tub packed with young women in bikinis.

A wife suspects her husband of an affair and demands he wash off the woman’s perfume. A woman openly flirts with Alex at a bar and later—after Alex slaps down a drunken man rudely hitting on her—the two end up in bed together. We see her in a cleavage-baring slip the next morning.

Violent Content

There’s quite a bit of brawling and death-dealing in this R-rated pic. Alex pounds away at several men in and out of the course of his job. He also breaks a man’s nose with a rifle butt. He batters another guy in a public restroom, smashing the man through a porcelain toilet. He slaps a drunk around at a hotel bar, slamming his head into the bar.

In another scene, Alex beats a killer mercilessly, slamming the man’s head and face into a car mirror and through a window. He then ties the bloodied man into the car and detonates a bomb on the vehicle’s undercarriage. We see him shoot several people in the head, up close and at a distance. He rips open a man’s gushing neck with a wire garrote.

In turn, Alex is also beaten badly by an angry police officer in a police interview. And the guy notes that he’ll take all afternoon to beat a confession out of him.

We’re shown pictures of two young boys with bruises all over their backs. A young girl is battered. We see her later with a bloody bullet hole in her forehead. A woman’s throat is slashed open by a man behind her, and the camera watches her bleed out. An innocent woman is shot in the throat by a gunman. Alex is shot in the side at one point and his shirt soon becomes soaked with blood. He opens his shirt, revealing the wound, then pours vodka on it and lights it afire to cauterize the laceration.

Someone tells a story about his wife getting hit by a drunk driver who then backs up to kill her son so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. A police sniper kills an innocent man. A man is riddled with bullets from police fire. Vincent tumbles out a second story window with an armed man who dies in the fall.

Crude or Profane Language

Some 40 f-words and a dozen s-words are joined by multiple uses of “a–hole” and “h—.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused seven times total (with God’s name being combined with “d–n” once).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Both Alex and Vincent drink pretty heavily in several separate scenes. We see others drinking champagne, wine and booze at bars and at a yacht party. Vincent and a fellow female agent get drunk at a bar. A man and woman drink shots of tequila. A murder victim’s wife is visibly drunk during a police interview.

Two different guys smoke cigarettes.

Alex regularly takes a prescription medication designed to help his Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. A wealthy woman receives injections of a drug from her private physician. And a doctor moves to give someone a lethal injection before he’s stopped. We’re told of a man who was high on meth.

Other Negative Elements

This film declares that criminal organizations have corrupted many in the high seats of power in the U.S. criminal justice system (and in Washington, D.C.). We see several different people in authority corrupted by money and promises of power. And in the end, it’s suggested that murder may be the only way to solve that systemic disease.

Some might winkingly say that Liam Neeson is yet again playing a hero who has something, ahem, taken from him: this time his memory.

But that’s not accurate, really. In part, that’s because Neeson initially plays a true villain here, albeit someone with a conscience that’s starting to awaken. So when he’s not killing people in the film Memory, he’s straining to give heavy handed aid to the real hero before he loses himself to Alzheimer’s.

We’re shown child sex trafficking and gory murder in a crime-riddled world rotted to the core by graft and power. And it’s all part and parcel of a badly broken and horribly corrupted U.S. justice system.

Does that make for a stark social commentary? Maybe. But it also leaves you stewing in a fairly dark worldview. And no amount of orange soda and Gummy bears will make that depressing and often foul viewpoint any sweeter.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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A pale facsimile of better action thrillers by star Liam Neeson or director Martin Campbell, Memory proves to be one of their most forgettable efforts yet.

It might not be Liam Neeson's best action movie, but if you're in the mood to watch him exercise a particular set of skills, Memory delivers.

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In 2020’s “ The Mole Agent ,” the Chilean director Maite Alberdi got an elderly investigator into a nursing home and filmed his attempts to uncover potential abuse there. The senior facility residents were told that they were to be the subjects of a documentary. Which was true, but definitely in a different way than they clearly believed, on the evidence of the movie itself. By the end of the picture, I was asking myself whether the tender and compassionate portraits of old folks in need the movie presented actually justified the arguable ethical breach committed by the filmmaker and his lead performer, who took on the title role.

Alberdi’s new movie, something like a straight-up documentary rather than a drama hybrid, is even more intimate, so much so that almost all of its running time only puts two people in the frame. Two prominent people—at least in their home country. Augusto Góngora was a television newscaster and interviewer from the early 1970s onward; he also produced films and books and acted in a miniseries for the great Raul Ruiz . His wife, Paulina Urrutia , 17 years his junior, is an actress with a solid filmography, not much of which has traveled to the United States. Alberdi’s movie chronicles their life together as they cope with Góngora’s condition, Alzheimer’s disease. 

Hoo boy. Having lost two reasonably close relatives to the condition and one other family member still dealing with it, I consider Alzheimer’s a particularly hateful ailment. And as you might imagine, my reflexive reaction to a documentary such as “The Eternal Memory” might be to recoil from an open flame. This is despite having gotten a lot out of the harrowing fictional journeys of Michael Haneke with “ Amour ” and Gaspar Noe with “ Vortex .” And, of course, I should know better here, too. Because even in a documentary, what makes the subject matter resonate, if at all, is how it’s framed. Alberdi frames this movie around the ethos Góngora stressed as a journalist. 

Because, if you haven’t been connecting the dots already, Góngora was at his job for the Pinochet regime. And reported its abuses insofar as he was permitted and/or able and then continued to dig into those abuses after Pinochet was put out of power. For Góngora, national memory—the refusal to forget the crimes of its rulers and their henchmen in the military and the police (which under Pinochet were pretty much the same)—is crucial. This makes his loss of personal memory all the more tragic and galvanic. 

Much of the movie was shot during the height of the Covid pandemic, which meant that Alberdi wasn’t even in the room with the couple. Camera work in many of the contemporary scenes was done by Urrutia, who is a kind and infinitely patient spouse—and also sometimes focus-challenged, not that it ultimately matters. 

Among the more vexing effects of Alzheimer’s goes beyond memory loss. Often the sufferer has no idea of where they are or what they’re doing there. “Where are my friends,” Góngora laments in a late-night rant, one of the sort that can sometimes take hours to pull a patient out of.   

These and many other moments are painful to watch. And they do make one wonder, again, about whether one ought to be watching them at all. There’s no narration in this movie, no text explaining when Góngora was diagnosed. (Or, for that matter, when and how he consented to be filmed. Not that I doubt he did—before his condition deteriorates, he acknowledges that he’s involved in a documentary—but it would be useful information.) We piece together Góngora’s relationship with Urrutia through often poignant-in-hindsight archival footage. It’s not until rather late in the movie that we learn Góngora has two children from a prior relationship, and we never find out how that relationship was resolved. 

Instead, we witness the degeneration of a noble mind and an interrogative soul. “I’m not myself anymore,” Góngora says to Urrutia late in the movie. “I think you are,” she responds. “No,” he says. And he repeats that word several times. We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine star in the age-gap romantic comedy movie The Idea of You, but how old are they compared to their characters?

Izzy In The Idea Of You Movie Is Completely Different From Her Book Character

In The Idea of You book, Izzy is a 12-year-old middle schooler who is obsessed with August Moon. However, in the movie adaptation, Izzy is a 16-year-old high school sophomore who thinks August Moon is “ So seventh grade ,” and is into feminist musicians. The age difference between the book version of Izzy and the movie version gives her a completely different personality and level of maturity . As a 12-year-old, Izzy is not old enough to understand the complexities of romantic relationships.

Izzy’s response to Hayes and Solene’s relationship in Lee’s version of the story is vastly different from her reaction in the movie. In the book, Izzy finds Hayes and Solene kissing and is angry with her mother. Her outrage is further magnified by the fact that she is relentlessly teased about her mother’s new boyfriend at school. However, the movie version of Izzy is more understanding of Haye’s and Solene’s relationship . Despite being initially shocked by their romance, Izzy is supportive of Solene and just wants her mother to be happy.

10 Biggest Changes The Idea Of You Movie Makes To The Book

With any movie adaptation of a beloved book, changes are made to fit the film format and please audiences, and The Idea of You had some big ones.

Izzy's Changes In The Idea Of You Helped The Movie's Themes

The fact that the movie version of The Idea of You aged Izzy served the story well. When Izzy becomes aware of Solene and Haye’s relationship, she comes to her mother’s aid instead of being angry at Solene for keeping her relationship a secret . At 16, Izzy was capable of recognizing that the media was treating Solene horribly because she was older than Hayes.

Further, Izzy’s maturity created a space for her and Solene to have open conversations about relationships that they wouldn’t have had if she had been a 12-year-old. The mother and daughter have a much better dynamic, which is reflected in the way that Izzy stands up for Solene amidst the media circus. Additionally, as a high schooler, Izzy had aged out of her obsession with August Moon, which made it easier for Solene to be with Hayes in The Idea of You .

The Idea of You (2024)

Director Michael Showalter

Release Date May 2, 2024

Cast Mathilda Gianopoulos, Jordan Aaron Hall, Anne Hathaway Nicholas Galitzine, Perry Mattfeld, Ella Rubin, Reid Scott, Annie Mumolo

Runtime 115 Minutes

• Entertainment

‘I Saw the TV Glow’ review: An exciting, uncompromising vision

Movie review.

Illuminated in the pink glow of a TV show, two teens sit in a basement as a harsh world waits outside. It’s the late ’90s and this fragile refuge is where they watch their favorite series, a fictional version of a phenomenon like “Buffy” known as “The Pink Opaque.” As they sit side-by-side, one begins to cry. What is it to feel such emotion from a television program? What is it to lose it? When seen through our tears, do life’s colors come into focus or get obscured?

Watching this scene back again from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s one-of-a-kind horror film “ I Saw the TV Glow ,” I found myself utterly mesmerized. As was the case in Schoenbrun’s fantastic feature debut, 2021’s “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” the beautiful, painful moment and the many that follow excavate an electrifying collection of reflections about identity, culture, loneliness and liberation. It’s a personal, poetic and profound work, like if someone crossed the dreamlike styles of David Lynch with the potently personal introspection of Charlie Kaufman. While Schoenbrun’s film embraces its many influences, it is a distinct work that lingers in the very soul. It’s not just one of the most original American films of recent memory, but the best of the year. 

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In Schoenbrun’s latest vision, the screen once again acts as both a mirror of modern life and a window to another one entirely. This is primarily seen through the eyes of Owen (briefly played at a young age by Ian Foreman before Justice Smith takes over for the remainder of the film), a lonely kid we first meet in a gentle, graceful scene under the cover of a rainbow parachute. When he meets Maddy, played by Brigette Lundy-Paine throughout, and finds connection through their shared obsession with “The Pink Opaque,” their lives become intertwined. While Owen feels alone at home, where his overbearing father is played by a truly menacing and almost entirely silent Fred Durst while his ailing mother is played by a dynamic Danielle Deadwyler, it’s his time spent watching the show when he finds some solace. That is, until Maddy vanishes without a trace, save for the striking image of her TV burning in the backyard. This leaves Owen to navigate life almost entirely alone as time, reality and the show begin to blur. 

“I Saw the TV Glow” is a work Schoenbrun has talked about being a trans allegory, and what a breathtaking one it is, never once feeling like it’s compromising their vision. Though the budget and scope are significantly larger than their previous feature, everything here feels just as intimate. Much of this falls to the cast, with both Lundy-Paine and Smith giving two of the best performances of the year, though Schoenbrun’s command of the craft proves most arresting. Whether it’s in the creation of “The Pink Opaque” or the “real world” outside it, everything is so precise. It’s like you’re watching someone make a painting of a dream that, while they now understand it, is full of pain and uncertainty when they first pick up the canvas. 

In every magnificent musical choice and moving monologue, a flood of meaning is bursting free. That this all culminates in what could be an abrupt ending is the point. Life can change in the blink of an eye, ripping open all we thought we knew about ourselves. While you appreciate it the first time, only by rewinding the tape to watch it all again can you fully take in everything Schoenbrun is doing. That you may find yourself doing so with tears of your own streaming down your face only makes the terrifying yet transcendent glow shine that much brighter.

With Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler. Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. 100 minutes. Rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements, and teen smoking. Opens May 16 at multiple theaters.

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StarTribune

Review: rob schneider shows mystic lake crowd there's humor outside the liberal bubble.

You can't say Rob Schneider didn't warn us.

Before the opening acts could take the stage at Mystic Lake Casino, the headliner's voice came booming over the speaker system.

"Those of you still in your political echo chambers may want take this time to pretend you forgot something in your Tesla," said Schneider, adding a vulgarity for emphasis.

Most in attendance Friday night already knew what to expect. Long after he was "makin' copies" on "Saturday Night Live" and stealing scenes in Adam Sandler movies, Schneider has become best known for representing anti-establishment conspiracists and courting controversy.

State Farm Insurance dropped him as a spokesperson in 2014 for his anti-vaccine stance. In late 2023, his act at a Republican holiday party was cut short because of offensive material. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican from Mississippi, even walked out.

Schneider's 70-minute act in the Prior Lake casino showroom wasn't terribly raunchy, at least not in the way we usually think of that word. He didn't swear all that much and steered clear of toilet humor. The 60-year-old was more focused on rallying to make America great again, specifically back to a time when woke activists and transgender people had much less power.

His tirades were often punctuated with funny material, like when he suggested China could destroy America simply by "dropping balloons full of gluten" over our country. He pointed out that there's a Gay Pride Month, but only one day to celebrate Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Perhaps, he suggested, the late presidents would get more glory if they had been sexual partners.

Some of his jokes were just as strong as the zingers he directed toward Hillary Clinton during a 2017 appearance at Treasure Island Casino. The bit about his relationship with his wife Friday night sounded like a solid springboard for a revamped version of "I Love Lucy."

But Schneider, who sported a hat and wore a checkered jacket over a Hawaiian shirt, spent considerable time on stage posing as a preacher without punchlines.

He insisted that "global warning is a scam" and that the woke agenda is just a new form of communism. He also had some ugly words about Islam. There were stretches where there were no jokes — he was just sermonizing.

Schneider's attacks might have had more sting if he mixed in some self-effacement. But he was too busy scolding those who don't understand that their government is feeding them lies and whining about being the victim of the liberal media.

"I don't know what show you were expecting, but this is the one you're getting," he said after a bit thrashing pro-Palestinian protesters. "I don't need to work in Hollywood anymore."

The only moment he really poked fun of himself is when he predicted Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign was in big trouble because he's the candidate's most famous supporter.

Schneider's approach may make him a hero in some circles, but it's keeping him from reaching his full potential as a standup.

Neal Justin covers the entertainment world, primarily TV and radio. He also reviews stand-up comedy. Justin is the founder of JCamp, a non-profit program for high-school journalists, and works on many fronts to further diversity in newsrooms.

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Customers say

Customers like the performance, responsiveness, and streaming of the digital device. They mention that it performs satisfactorily, is responsive, and has a wide range of streaming capabilities. They also appreciate the ease of installation and remote control features. That said, opinions are mixed on connectivity and remote controls.

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Customers like the performance of the digital device. They mention that it performs satisfactorily, is pleased with the functionality it provides, and has amazing performance. Some appreciate the enhanced performance and stability that Wi-Fi 6 provides. They also mention that the device is easy to set up and operate.

"...Value for Money: Considering the quality, performance , and access to a vast library of content, the Fire TV Stick 4K offers incredible value for..." Read more

"I’m not very tech savvy, but this was extremely easy to set up and also to operate . It’s “plug and play” easy...." Read more

"...It was difficult for elderly dad to handle & see. Therefore he was unable to use it ." Read more

"...chatting with friends and family, you'll appreciate the enhanced performance and stability that Wi-Fi 6 provides...." Read more

Customers find the installation of the digital device to be easy. They mention that it's very easy to set up, use, and program the remote. They also say that it easily connects to the screen and does exactly as it should. Customers also say it'll navigate through movies and shows than the previous version.

"...fire stick makes it easy to find what you’re looking for with its easy to use menu and voice search feature. The voice feature is awesome...." Read more

"...It's intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy to navigate through the vast content library. The voice remote with Alexa is a game-changer...." Read more

"...It’s “ plug and play” easy . I purchased it as a way to watch streaming services so I could discontinue paying for overpriced cable service...." Read more

"...I would definitely recommend considering how easy it is to use and how many apps it offers, this is so much better than just paying for live channels." Read more

Customers like the quality of the digital device. They say it's worth the money, easy to install, and navigate. Some say that it saves quite a bit of money.

"...The available content is surprising ...." Read more

"...Value for Money: Considering the quality , performance, and access to a vast library of content, the Fire TV Stick 4K offers incredible value for..." Read more

"...This was a great purchase for my home and it allows access to all the streaming apps I use. The price can’t be beat.So long, cable TV!" Read more

"...So one stick in one tv and two remotes working it. One stick dead ...." Read more

Customers like the responsiveness of the digital device. They mention that it's much faster, apps load quickly, and switching between content is seamless. The WiFi6 makes this super fast, and they have had no issues with lagging since the upgrade. They are quick to answer phone calls if you have a problem, and programed, this is a quantum leap improvement in performance. It connects quickly to their not-so-new TV and was ready to use in no time.

"...That’s me!The performance is great . The picture quality is awesome, and I haven't experienced any lag or buffering issues...." Read more

"... Apps load quickly , and switching between content is seamless. The device has handled everything I’ve thrown at it without any lag...." Read more

"...The downloads and updates were not difficult , but four were too much...." Read more

"...is another standout feature of the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K. With faster and more reliable Wi-Fi connectivity, you can enjoy smooth streaming and..." Read more

Customers are satisfied with the picture quality of the digital device. They mention that it has stunning picture quality, clear, bright, and rich in color. They are also impressed with the video quality, saying that it's crisp and clear.

"...That’s me!The performance is great. The picture quality is awesome , and I haven't experienced any lag or buffering issues...." Read more

"...of the essence with streaming devices, and the Fire TV Stick 4K doesn’t disappoint . Apps load quickly, and switching between content is seamless...." Read more

"...With support for 4K Ultra HD , HDR, and Dolby Atmos audio, you'll feel like you're right in the middle of the action from the comfort of your own..." Read more

"...It has a good picture on ordinary rental TVs . It was easy to set up at home before we took it on its first trip...." Read more

Customers are satisfied with the streaming capabilities of the digital device. They mention that it has impressive streaming capabilities, and the features are the very best for streaming. They say that the streaming is seamless, easy to navigate, and able to enjoy streaming live TV, latest movies, and TV shows. They also appreciate the great streaming quality, and say that switching between menus and different streaming options is nearly instantaneous.

"...to the all-new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, and it has completely transformed my streaming experience ...." Read more

"...movies and TV episodes, support for Wi-Fi 6, and the ability to watch free and live TV , this powerful device offers endless entertainment options in..." Read more

"...The streaming and video quality is excellent ...However:The bad thing is that the audio/ sound quality is horrible...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the connectivity of the digital device. Some mention that the Bluetooth connects immediately, it is capable of connecting to 5G Wi-Fi, and it connects to their TV without much of a hassle. However, others say that they had issues pairing with their TV and having issues with the remote connectivity.

"...But we started having connectivity issues and lagging while playing videos...." Read more

"...Extras: One of my favorite features is the ability to use Bluetooth headphones for private listening ...." Read more

"...Now no connectivity on the new stick and the new remote works on the older stick in my bedroom. So one stick in one tv and two remotes working it...." Read more

"...This new one is fast, fast, fast. The remote didn't "attach" very smoothly , so I mostly just use the old remote, but I can pretty much use either..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the remote control. Some mention that it works perfectly, is handy, and simple. They also love the Alexa remote. However, others say that it doesn't work after only few uses, is cheap, and is difficult to see what is on.

"...to find what you’re looking for with its easy to use menu and voice search feature . The voice feature is awesome...." Read more

"...Even TiVo streams. There is no numbers on the remote of the firestick...." Read more

"...The voice remote with Alexa is a game-changer ...." Read more

"...an AppleTV device on another set, and I feel like the Firestick remote is easier to use and has volume control...." Read more

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