1:30 Behind the Wheel of a Car Bomb: Liam Neeson returns in high tension!

Liam Neeson is back! After Blacklight, which was released in February 2022, the 71-year-old actor is already back in cinema with Retribution. This time he ditches pure action for a feverish thriller that mostly takes place in the passenger compartment of a car!

Neeson plays Matt, a successful businessman. The latter discovers that a bomb was planted in his car by an unknown assailant. This mysterious man orders him to perform a series of actions throughout the day or the bomb will explode… killing him and his family.

Revenge marks director Nimrod Antal’s return to cinema after 13 years with Predators alongside Adrien Broad. Between Speed ​​and A Day in Hell, this thriller is a remake of The Unknown Call, a Spanish film released in 2016. Luis Tosar played Carlos, the equivalent of Liam Neeson’s character in Revenge.

In the remake, Jack Champion, the young actor who played Spider-Man in Avatar 2, plays Matt’s son. In turn, Matthew Modine plays Liam Neeson’s partner, who, despite himself, embarked on this deadly adventure.

Keep in mind that Nimrod Antal wanted to bring real freshness to the character played by Liam Neeson, rather than surfing the fads of action movies the actor had already done. According to the director, Neeson has often played characters with specific abilities, but in this film he plays a guy like others who just wants to protect his family.

“The mission is made all the more difficult as the demands of the mysterious voice become more and more dangerous and the tension on the Turner family grows every time”– says the director.

Thirty hours under tension!

The thriller was shot both on the streets of Berlin and on location in a studio in Babelsberg (the capital of the Land of Brandenburg), using technology similar to the Mandalorian in the Star Wars series: projecting images onto LED walls for authentic integration. Exteriors in a controlled environment.

The cars were hauled on flatbed trucks, a common feature of film production, and then towed on real roads to give the illusion that the characters were behind the wheel. Next, the production designed a digital environment to immerse the audience in the heart of the chaos in the company of Neeson and his partners.

The limited space in which Nimrod Antal could operate his cameras forced him to refine his work as a director on a daily basis. “The fact that the whole story takes place in a car forced me to thoroughly prepare the shooting. I drew everything to avoid taking the same shot twice, highlighted the composition and acting of the actors to make sure I got consistency. Overall, to keep the story fluid”– said the director.

But for this film, since the team couldn’t control the camera as freely as they wanted, the challenge was to give the image enough depth. “to keep the audience’s attention and above all to ensure that the result is entertaining”adds the filmmaker.

Additionally, Nimrod Antal took inspiration from claustrophobic thrillers like Loki with Tom Hardy, Vincenzo Natali’s The Cube and Platform to approach filming tense sequences in confined spaces.