The Mongoose (2026)
There is a particular kind of action film that lives or dies on a single, clean premise, and The Mongoose arrives with one of the cleaner ones in recent memory. A decorated war hero, falsely accused and cornered, takes to the road in a cross-country car chase that plays out live on television, with a network of former Special Forces comrades helping him stay ahead of the law and an increasingly obsessed public watching every mile. It is the kind of high-concept setup that practically writes its own trailer, and it arrives in 2026 as an Australian-produced genre picture from Code Entertainment and The Solution, two outfits that have made a business of delivering mid-budget action with an eye on international audiences.
At the helm is Mark Vanselow, whose background is rooted in stunt coordination and second-unit work across a lengthy career in Hollywood action pictures. That experience promises at least a fluency with vehicles and physical filmmaking. The script comes from Thompson Evans, working in the tradition of the renegade-on-the-run thriller, a genre with a long and not always distinguished history. The cast is headed by Liam Neeson, an actor who has spent the better part of two decades becoming synonymous with a particular brand of gruff, capable screen toughness, the kind of man you believe can handle both a steering wheel and a crisis. Alongside him are Marisa Tomei, Ving Rhames, Marcus Thomas, and Michael Chiklis, names that carry genuine weight on paper and suggest a film with more ambition than the average streaming-shelf action release. Whether that promise is kept is another matter entirely.
On the craft side, cinematographer Tom Stern brings a career largely defined by his long collaboration with Clint Eastwood, shooting films like Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Letters from Iwo Jima with a preference for available-light naturalism and muted, sometimes near-monochromatic colour palettes. It is an interesting and somewhat unexpected choice for a road-chase thriller, and his work here leans into wide, open road geography and the particular quality of light that Australian landscapes provide in abundance, golden and hard-edged in equal measure. The editing falls to Rodrigo Balart, whose cuts shape the rhythm of the chase sequences and determine how much kinetic energy actually transfers to the screen. Michael Yezerski provides the score, a composer with roots in Canadian genre television and film who tends towards muscular, percussion-driven work that suits an action context well enough. The sonic texture here is in that vein: engine-adjacent and propulsive, designed to push the film forward rather than to linger. For a companion piece from Australian cinema that takes a very different tonal approach, see also The Babadook (2014), and I also reviewed another recent Australian production in Dead Howling (2026), if you want a sense of where local genre filmmaking is landing at the moment.
On paper, The Mongoose should have been catnip for me. I love a good car-chase film, the burnt rubber and the screaming engines, and the premise here, a falsely accused war hero leading the police on an epic televised cross-country chase, sounds like exactly my sort of thing. Sadly, the reality does not deliver.
To be fair, there is plenty of burnt rubber and howling engine on offer, and I will always have time for the throaty growl of a good Shelby. But that is about where the pleasures end. The story is thoroughly cliché and surface-level, the sort you can call beat for beat from the opening scene, and neither the acting nor the casting does anything to lift it. There is simply no one here to invest in between the chases.
It plainly wants to run in the same lane as the likes of Need for Speed and Fast & Furious, but it is not fit to share a road with either. And I say that having found Need for Speed itself fairly thin, all engine note and not a lot else; this does not even reach that bar. Two stars. A car-chase movie that gets the cars right and almost nothing else, and a frustrating miss given how squarely it was aimed at someone like me.
The Mongoose is the sort of film that finds its audience among the Friday-night-action crowd, and there is nothing wrong with aiming squarely at that bracket. The car-chase film as a genre has produced genuinely thrilling work over the decades, and the televised-pursuit hook gives this one a reasonable claim to contemporary relevance, the idea of a fugitive as a media spectacle sits comfortably alongside a culture that watches almost everything unfold in real time. I covered a film with a similarly mixed bag of genre ambition in Apart (2026), and it is worth noting that squandered potential is something of a recurring frustration in mid-budget action. The Mongoose has the right engine under the bonnet. It just never quite finds the road.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2026 | Watched: 2026-11-06
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Mongoose (2026) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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