Tis the season for a new Liam Neeson movie. And the latest is “The Mongoose”, an action-packed road thriller that mostly caters to the seasoned actor’s limitations. Now that’s not a knock on Neeson who over the last twenty years has done an amazing job reinventing himself as his own kind of unconventional action star. But he is 74 years old, and Father Time takes his toll us all. But the movie sometimes forgets that, which is when its numerous problems stand out the most.

This time around Neeson plays Ryan Flanagan, a former Army special forces soldier who finds himself in a hairy situation. We meet him as he crosses the state line into Arkansas with six state troopers behind him, a roadblock ahead of him, and a chopper overhead. The obvious question is how did he get into this mess? That’s something the movie unpacks over the course of its breezy yet clunky 95 minutes.

Let’s just say Ryan is on the run for a homicide committed in Kentucky. But as you can probably guess, there’s much more to the story. The victim is a prominent yet corrupt defense attorney who also happens to be the abusive fiancé of his ex-wife, Tara (Marisa Tomei). Now Ryan is speeding across the South in one of the movie’s biggest stars – a killer red and black Shelby Super Snake. The car is an immediate attention-grabber and first-time director Mark Vanselow makes it the centerpiece of several adrenaline-fueled chase sequences.

As he’s pursued, Ryan is contacted by Major James Tilton (Maurice Marvel Meredith) with the Arkansas State Police who hopes to bring Ryan in safely and without incident. But waiting for him in Texas is Major Walter Pope (Michael Chiklis), a rigid and hard-nosed trooper with a history of excessive force, who has much different plans for Ryan if he makes it into his state. Pope is a comically villainous caricature who serves the story as the blandest of antagonists.

But things get really messy in a series of well-intentioned flashbacks to Ryan’s military tour in Northern Afghanistan some two decades earlier. What happens there adds some important context to Ryan and his squadmates Tanker (Vhing Rhames) and Munch (Marcus Thomas). But the scenes struggle to work dramatically, in large part due to the glaringly obvious fact that Neeson and Rhames are too old for their roles. The scenes set up the film’s attempt at examining the sacrifices made by those who serve. But it comes off as a well-meaning yet clumsily artificial salute to veterans.

The script stumbles in even more ways. There is a wildly underdeveloped angle where Ryan’s vet status inexplicably turns him into a folk hero as people watch the pursuit over CNN. And some of his methods of evading the cops are unintentionally hilarious, including one of the fastest vehicle paint jobs in movie history. The movie even fumbles its ending by failing to give us the one reunion we actually care about seeing.

Without question, there is an audience out there for “The Mongoose”. And the movie is clearly made with that audience in mind. For me, there are a lot worst ways to spend 95 minutes of your day. But that doesn’t make this a “good” movie. The hokey dialogue, some cartoonish characters, lazy cliches, lapses in logic, and the paper-thin handling of its themes are just some of the issues that keeps it from being something worthy of a recommendation.

VERDICT – 2 STARS