“I’ve no time to look at cameras!”
Liam Neeson has been Hollywood’s mature and respectable action star for so long that we forget he has still only made one Very Good film, that being his very first action film Taken. Everything since has been a watered down replica with Neeson playing an ‘ex-something’ forced by circumstances into blowing factory produced bad guys away.
A Walk among the Tombstones might have been the film Max Payne wanted to be, but that doesn’t mean Max Payne set its sights very high.
Neeson plays Matt Scudder, a (sigh) ex-cop who is rebuilding his life. He is tee-total and trying to maintain a straight line in a world gone crooked.
When a dishonest and crooked man approaches Scudder with a job that can’t be fulfilled using the police force, Scudder initially declines the dirty money that he will be paid, but something resonates in this case, and he finds himself on a missing person’s case through the seedy streets of the city lawfulness forgot.
The premise is that bad guys kidnap from other bad guys, quite cleverly realising that non-law abiders are unlikely to want police assistance and attention, and are also in a position to pay large ransoms. With Scudder no longer having the badge but retaining the smarts and contacts, he is the perfect replacement. He tracks the action through the tenements and the back doors of urban decay, at times teaming with a whip smart and wily young homeless black kid named TJ.
The story is quite linear and frankly not that mind-blowing, like the filmmakers are keeping the ‘best bits’ for the next film. Unfortunately though after a promising first couple minutes the action is far more 8MM than Lethal Weapon, meaning decidedly non-flashy and non-commercial. There is a fairly high body count but unremarkable action sequences. With an absence of tricks and dour characters and backdrop, A Walk Among the Tombstones needed far to warrant revisiting ‘Matt shoots people who stand between him and wallowing in sadness’.
I can’t recommend this film. Just know that it isn’t that bad, but it’s not clever enough to be this dark, and not flashy enough to attract casual action fans. If Neeson is trying to shed the restraints of being perceived as an Action only star, he should make a more definitive move rather than this ‘dabble’ into darker teriitory.
So it should be no surprise that 2015 will somehow see Taken 3 (put a leash on that daughter Bryan!), despite no-one really asking for it. The fact is that while Taken was similarly violent and occasionally grim, it is not nearly as dark as this meander through the tombstones, markers that might very well represent the mis-steps that Neeson has taken since… you know what.
Final Rating – 6.7 / 10. Easier to admire than to like. A better Neeson vehicle than most, but still misses the mark, leaving him in danger of Stathaming out soon.
