Liam Neeson hoons through Victoria in action-thriller The Mongoose

Liam Neeson is back!

Back in Victoria that is, for his third all-action adventure filmed here over the last few years. Not that any of those movies have actually taken place in Victoria: Blacklight was set in Washington DC, while Ice Road: Vengeance was set largely in Nepal. But for eagle-eyed viewers – or just anyone who’s ever looked out a window in Victoria – Neeson might as well have been running down the Bourke St mall wearing a Richmond footy jumper and carrying a latte.

The Mongoose doesn’t even wait to drop viewers deep in the heart of Victoria. Opening mid-story, Ryan ‘Fang’ Flanagan (Neeson) is already on the run from the law and driving a Mustang Shelby Super Snake GT350 down the wrong side of the road along a highway that’s meant to be in Arkansas but those wire crash barriers aren’t fooling anyone.

As he’s hooning around dodging various police cars in what are some reasonably impressive car stunt sequences – we’re not talking original Mad Max or anything, but it’s not like any locally-set films have featured a decent car chase in recent memory – a few other things start to come into focus. He’s a veteran who saw his buddy die in Afghanistan; his car chase is attracting media attention; and he’s starting to bond with the car’s surprisingly flirtatious on-board computer. 

A man on the run

More importantly, his fast driving has taken him to a small town where the cops are hoping to shut him down. Good news for fans of central Victoria: this is the most exciting that Castlemaine is ever going to look.

If you’ve ever taken the train to Bendigo, you’ll recognise the railway crossing Fang flings his car across in a final attempt to lose his police pursuers, and not just because the train he beats over the tracks is obviously a V/Line locomotive (they didn’t even bother changing the colour scheme).

Gradually we get the big reveal as to why he’s driving so fast, and where he got the car from. Turns out when Fang came home from the war he was too messed up for his wife Tara (Marisa Tomei) to stay with him. There’s no hard feelings though, and when her rich new boyfriend Todd (Brett Tucker) put her in the hospital, Fang went over to collect her things. Todd turned up, one thing led to another, and now Fang’s driving a stolen car across America.

Well, ‘America’, because he’s crossed the border and now he’s driving through the parts of Texas that are full of gum trees.

Watch the trailer

Neeson in fine form

Snark aside, The Mongoose is a step up from many of Neeson’s recent movies (including the two filmed in Victoria). He does enough fighting in the flashbacks to keep the action level up, while having the present day thrills confined to cars hooning around allows the seventy-something-year-old to fend off dozens of cops in a plausible fashion. Things might be implausible, but The Mongoose moves fast and that covers up a lot of sins.

Speaking of cops, while the level-headed Major Tilton (Maurice Marvel Meredith) – along with his offsider Captain McBride (Toby Truslove, giving his American accent a work out) – are initially in charge of the pursuit, once Fang crosses into Texas, up steps Major Pope (Michael Chiklis), who gets to chew the scenery in entertaining fashion as Fang avoids roadblock after roadblock and starts to become something of a pop culture hero.

Victorian landmarks in an unconvincing America

Things eventually start to get silly as Fang’s old war buddies (including Ving Rhames) take to the sky in a helicopter to help him out, but by this stage Victorian viewers – and possibly international ones familiar with Melbourne’s highways – will be too busy pointing at the screen and saying, ‘I’ve driven past there!’

The highlight of the film is a big extended chase scene that suddenly jumps from some generic backstreets around Port Melbourne to the stormwater access roads alongside and underneath the highway from Tullamarine Airport into the centre of Melbourne. You know the big row of giant bright red sticks you pass as you head into the city, officially known as the Melbourne International Gateway? At one point Fang is driving right past them, making him officially an Australian citizen.

Whatever flaws The Mongoose has as a movie, it does a solid job of showing us parts of Australia we don’t really get to see that often on screen. Where local productions are usually focused on scenic settings like coastal towns or the outback, here we get to see the kind of locations where most of us actually live – even if the story’s taking place half a world away.

Seeing Fang fang it in a hotted-up Mustang past a bunch of double-fronted brick veneer houses in an extremely Aussie-looking regional town is enough to make even the most cynical viewer feel a little patriotic. If only he’d found the time to do a few burnouts along Chapel Street while he was at it.

The Mongoose is now on Prime Video.

Discover more screen, games & arts news and reviews on ScreenHub and ArtsHub. Sign up for our free ArtsHub and ScreenHub newsletters.