Hans Petter Moland directs the contemplative thriller about a Boston underworld enforcer seeking to atone for his failings as a parent, also featuring Yolonda Ross, Frankie Shaw and Ron Perlman.

Ever since 2008’s Taken opened up a surprisingly durable late-career reinvention for Liam Neeson as a taciturn action star of tough-guy dad thrillers, frequently dispatching lowlifes who mess with his family, it’s become the norm to expect more of the same. Especially from an entry with a blunt one-word title like Absolution. This latest variation on the formula has those key ingredients, but the relatively few bursts of violence are tempered by a melancholic undertow, and the ticking clock this time is an internal one in the protagonist, identified only in the credits as “Thug.”

As in 2022’s unmemorable Memory, in which the actor portrayed a contract killer dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s, Neeson plays a man facing rapidly diminishing faculties. A former boxer who has spent the last 30 years as an enforcer, collecting payments and doing pickups and deliveries for a Boston gangster, Thug is diagnosed with an advanced case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy — an untreatable neurodegenerative disease resulting from a lifetime of concussions that started around age six, probably at the hand of his father.

The ruminative redemption thriller reunites Neeson with Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, with whom he worked on the 2019 remake, Cold Pursuit, playing a Colorado snowplow driver who sets out to avenge the murder of his son by a Denver drug cartel. That movie was a mixed bag — watchable but no match for Moland’s own homeland original, In Order of Disappearance, a terrific Stellan Skarsgard vehicle that more effectively nailed the blend of tragedy, bloody violence and mordant humor.

Using many of the same key collaborators from that 2014 film — notably DP Philip Ogaard, production designer Jorgen Stangebye Larsen and composer Kaspar Kaae — Moland delivers a sharp-looking, well-paced movie with a moody score.

Absolution remains gripping even if Tony Gayton’s screenplay doesn’t always avoid cliché and contrivance, particularly in a final act that stretches to cover too much ground. On the plus side, the director’s Nordic sensibility means he spends a pleasing amount of time on milieu and character development and has little use for sentimentality, lending the material soulfulness and psychological depth that get you invested in the solitary protagonist.

While Thug has learned never to ask questions about whatever goods he’s carrying, he gets partnered on jobs with Conner’s mouthy cokehead son Kyle (Daniel Diemer), who’s curious and dumb enough to make him a liability. Cocky and impatient to learn the business so he can prove his worth to his father, the kid chafes at the veteran’s brusque career guidance, which leads to messy repercussions down the line.

Thug falls into a half-hearted romance with a similarly unnamed character credited as Woman (Yolonda Ross), after knocking out her abusive boyfriend with a single punch in a local bar. She’s younger, but not so much that the relationship is implausible, and she has her own troubled history. She’s warm and funny and drawn to him, not scared off by his gruff side or his reluctance to show tenderness.

When Thug’s lapses of memory become impossible to ignore — he forgets names and addresses at first, then more significant things as his illness progresses — he sees a neurologist who gives him two years at most before he will become unable to care for himself. He’s about to blow his brains out in the car immediately after, until the face of a child in another car changes his mind.