The first trailer for the upcoming action thriller Memory is here to teach us that the official wait time before putting Liam Neeson back into another action film as an assassin who loses his memory is exactly eleven years.
Memory follows the story of one Alex Lewis, an “expert assassin” with a particular set of skills that earn him renown for “discreet precision.” But when Lewis refuses to finish a job because it contradicts his own deeply-held moral code, he then has to kill his contractors before they find him first. The only catch is that Alex is slowly losing his memories, which presents a disadvantage when your job involves dealing with the most dangerous people in the criminal underworld.
Here’s the movie’s official synopsis, as provided by Open Road Films:
“Memory follows Alex Lewis (Liam Neeson), an expert assassin with a reputation for discreet precision. Caught in a moral quagmire, Alex refuses to complete a job that violates his code and must quickly hunt down and kill the people who hired him before they and FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce) find him first. Alex is built for revenge but, with a memory that is beginning to falter, he is forced to question his every action, blurring the line between right and wrong.”
If the premise of Memory sounds all too familiar to you, though, it’s because you’re probably thinking of 2011’s Unknown, another action flick that followed roughly the same narrative, only in reverse, with Neeson losing his memory entirely at the beginning of the movie.
Frankly, we’ve seen so many action thrillers headlined by Liam Neeson as the ultimate killing machine that they’re all starting to blend together at this point. But who knows, maybe Memory — coming out on April 29 — will prove a welcome exception to the rule.
