'The Mongoose' Review: Liam Neeson's Latest Action Thriller Runs Out of Gas
By Dan Bremner - November 9, 2026
The latest action-thriller starring Liam Neeson, once again playing a man accused of a crime he didn’t commit and once again tearing across the country while the authorities try to stop him. Since officially retiring from action films back in 2017, Neeson has somehow managed to crank out two or three of these things every single year in a run that has long since passed into self-parody. There is the occasional bright spot (his turn in 2025’s The Naked Gun was genuinely refreshing) but for the most part it has been utter drivel.
You know the exact release pattern by now: it opens theatrically in the US, gets panned and bombs, then quietly makes its money back on VOD from divorced fathers while the UK gets it dumped straight onto Sky Cinema or Amazon Prime. The Mongoose is no different. It has an old-school cross-country chase premise that should have been good fun, yet large stretches are simply dull, the action is chopped to pieces to hide Neeson’s age, the script is frequently atrocious, and it contains more than a few “so bad it’s funny” moments that feel accidental rather than intentional. Big Liam might be 74 and still doing these films, but I’m the one who’s tired of them at this point.
The story itself is thin to the point of transparency and runs almost entirely on leftover tropes. A decorated war hero with PTSD is framed for something he didn’t do, goes on the run, leans on his brothers-in-arms, and somehow picks up a sympathetic public that starts rooting for him like he’s a folk legend. None of it withstands even mild scrutiny. Logical gaps, convenient coincidences and repeated dumb-luck escapes pile up until the whole thing starts to feel lazy rather than pulpy. The film seems far more interested in broad “honour the troops” sentiment and the next car stunt than in building any meaningful stakes or internal logic, and the result is a plot that constantly threatens to collapse under its own weight.
What keeps it from being a total write-off is the practical action, which is clearly where the real money and attention went. This is the directorial debut of Mark Vanselow, Neeson’s long-time stunt double and a veteran stunt coordinator, and you can feel that background in the chase sequences. The film prioritises real metal and real risk over heavy CGI, and the numerous car pursuits, many of them built around a Mustang Shelby Super Snake GT350 (I don't know cars. I googled it) to have a kinetic charge. There’s a ridiculous helicopter-to-car transfer and another hairy helicopter sequence that stand out as the most engaging moments in the entire runtime. For short stretches it actually feels like a throwback to the scrappy 1970s chase films it wants to evoke and those sequences have a drive-in energy the rest of the movie can’t match.
At an almost tight-ninety the film at least has the decency to move quickly. It opens in the middle of a chase and mostly keeps its foot on the accelerator, which stops the thinner material from completely bogging down. There’s a compact, almost mini-Speed quality to the pacing that makes it relatively painless to sit through even when the story is running on fumes. In a genre that often outstays its welcome, the breezy runtime is a small mercy. It's not enough to save it, but it's small praise I'll let it have.
Neeson himself is exactly as you expect him to be at this stage. He shows up with the same intense-yet-grounded persona he’s been polishing across a decade of military and revenge thrillers, and he remains an easy actor to root for purely because he is, after all, Liam Neeson. The film is smart enough to keep him behind the wheel for large portions of the runtime, which plays to his remaining strengths and minimises the more obvious limitations of age. He doesn’t embarrass himself too much, the script simply gives him very little to do you haven't seen before.
That script is where most of the real damage is done. Dialogue frequently lands with a clunky, forced thud (especially anything to do with the back and forth between Neeson and the AI car interface), and some of the lines from the pursuing Major are so over-the-top they loop around into accidental comedy. The Afghanistan flashbacks are particularly poorly handled with the de-aging or makeup work on Neeson is unconvincing, the montages are semi-incomprehensible, and they never feel meaningfully integrated into the present-day chase. Outside of the action the film often feels creatively bankrupt, as if everyone involved knew the car stuff would do the heavy lifting and simply stopped trying everywhere else.
The supporting cast don’t get much help either. Marisa Tomei elevates what she’s given with her usual professionalism, but Michael Chiklis as the glowering Major Pope spends most of the film in full scenery-chewing mode, and it is amusing to see him spout these ridiculous lines, but you know he's much better than this. A number of the smaller roles and media-cameo parts feel underdeveloped or simply wasted. You keep catching glimpses of better actors stuck in a film that has no real use for them. Why was Ving Rhames here and given nothing to do?
The Mongoose is a tired, formulaic late-career Liam Neeson chase thriller that manages a handful of genuinely strong practical car sequences and a mercifully short runtime. However, it is constantly dragged down by a ridiculous plot, clunky writing and the overwhelming sense that everyone involved is simply going through the motions. The stunt work briefly gives energy of 1970s drive-in chase film, but the surrounding film is too hollow, too lazily assembled and too familiar to turn those moments into anything more than fleeting distractions.
'The Mongoose' is streaming now on Prime Video.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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