Memory arrives with the one thing most late-period Liam Neeson thrillers lack: an idea you cannot shake. Its hero is a contract killer whose memory is being eaten away by early-onset Alzheimer’s — a man who kills for a living and can no longer trust the one tool the work demands, his own recall. For a few scenes that premise does something genuinely unsettling to the familiar Neeson template, the gruff avenger with a particular set of skills. Here the skills are failing, the notes scrawled on his forearm are the only thread he has left, and the avenger is racing the clock inside his own head.

Then the film around the idea reasserts itself. Directed by Martin Campbell — the craftsman who twice rebooted James Bond with GoldenEye and Casino Royale — and written by Dario Scardapane, Memory is a remake of the 2003 Belgian thriller The Memory of a Killer, itself drawn from Jef Geeraerts’ novel. Alex Lewis (Neeson) is hired for a job in El Paso, refuses to murder a trafficked teenage girl, and becomes a loose end somebody powerful wants cut. On the other side of the case is FBI agent Vincent Serra, played by Guy Pearce, working the same trail of child exploitation and money toward Monica Bellucci‘s untouchable real-estate magnate.

A better idea than the film around it

The casting of Pearce is the movie’s sharpest move, and it knows it — a quiet wink to Memento, the Christopher Nolan film built entirely on a man who cannot form new memories. Memory wants that lineage. It reaches for moral murk: an assassin who is not simply the good man wronged, a system in which the police and the rich are tangled, an ending pitched closer to tragedy than to triumph. Campbell stages the early stretches with real economy, and Neeson, working in a lower and sadder register than his action paydays usually allow, makes the disintegration legible without ever overplaying the tremor.

Where it loses the thread

But the gravity keeps outrunning the execution. For a thriller from the man who shot two of the best action openings of the modern Bond era, Memory is strangely inert — long on conversation, short on the kinetic charge the premise seems to promise, and curiously unwilling to fire the arsenal it spends an hour loading. Pearce’s agent is given procedure but little inner life; Bellucci, a genuinely formidable presence, is stranded in a part that asks her to be coldly powerful and not much else. The corruption plot tidies itself into the shape of a hundred other border-noir potboilers, and the haunting hook — a killer who may forget why he is killing — gets reduced to a plot mechanic rather than the engine of dread it could have been. The result feels, in The Hollywood Reporter’s phrase, oddly empty at its core.

That is the frustration of Memory: it is trying. As Variety allowed, it is at least reaching for something more serious than the usual Neeson-with-a-gun assignment, and the first act suggests a far better, bleaker film waiting inside it. The good bones are visible — a strong premise, a capable director, a lead leaning into vulnerability instead of vengeance. They just never close the distance between intention and impact. The picture has a fine opening, a promising middle and a verdict it never fully earns.

Watch it for Neeson finding the sadness under the formula, and for the rare Campbell thriller that prefers melancholy to spectacle. Expect, though, the disappointment of a film that remembers exactly what it wants to be and forgets, again and again, how to get there. Memory is the workmanlike middle of a genre that can do far better — and, on the evidence of its own first twenty minutes, so could it.