Liam Neeson is Wasted 'In the Land of Saints & Sinners'

You know something’s severely wrong with a film if you find yourself fixating on the casting – not just mulling over who’s in the ensemble, but how they all got assembled together. If you’re stuck on the mechanics of how brilliant actors ended up alongside each other, there’s an implicit judgment that the film is much lesser than their collective talents.

Enter In the Land of Saints and Sinners, a film with one of the strongest Irish casts in recent memory and a script with frighteningly little to offer them. Inexplicably premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Saints and Sinners reeks of a lack of polish and sophistication; its 70s-set story of violent secrets coming back to haunt Irish hitmen and IRA terrorists in small-town Donegal feels like it’s riffing on the back catalog of Troubles-era fiction rather than sprouting an original tale from a country’s lived history. While the cast is top-notch, they only reveal how undeserving they are of this suboptimal thriller.

A trio of Oscar-nominees leads the pack: Liam Neeson (Widows) as Finbar, a hitman nearing retirement; Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) as Doireann, an IRA agent hiding out in Finbar’s village after a Dublin explosion claimed the life of child bystanders; and Ciarán Hinds (The Dry) as Vinnie, the local Garda officer (Ireland’s national police service) whose kinship with Finbar is predicated on him not knowing his friend’s violent past and true identity.