Back in 2001, Guy Pearce starred in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” a film about a man tracking down his wife’s killer while suffering from memory loss, using notes and tattoos on his body to remember clues in his search. In 2022, he’s co-starring in a film in which a contract killer suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s uses similar methods in order to keep track of details. But that’s where the comparisons between “Memento” and Martin Campbell’s “Memory” end. The former was a groundbreaking Neo-noir classic; the latter is best forgotten as soon as possible.
“Memory” is yet another entry in the Liam Neeson Gets Revenge sub-genre, a sprawling body of work that sprung up after the surprise success of the 2008 action-thriller “Taken.” You know the drill: a child or some other vulnerable person is threatened, his character has got a very particular set of skills, rescue and/or vengeance ensues. That’s at least one of the plots of “Memory,” a tangled mess of intertwining storylines and too many two-dimensional characters.
“Memory” is a remake of a 2003 Belgian crime thriller, “De zaak Alzheimer,” based on the book by Jef Geeraerts. Dario Scardapane adapted the screenplay for “Memory,” which is fairly faithful to the original. Neeson plays Alex Lewis, the aforementioned assassin with Alzheimer’s, who’s getting out of the game after one last gig. When he discovers one of his intended victims is a young teenage girl, a victim of sex trafficking by her father, who was accidentally killed in an FBI raid, Alex not only backs out, he decides to go after everyone who hired him to kill the girl in the first place.
