Starring: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, Boyd Holbrook, Sebastian Roché
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 114 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2014
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A strong match of star and source material, ‘A Walk Among The Tombstones’ rises slightly above its presentation as a workmanlike hardboiled thriller thanks to a solid Liam Neeson performance.
Matt Scudder (Liam Neeson) works in New York City as an unlicensed private detective, doing ‘favours’ for people in exchange for ‘gifts’ – namely wads of cash. A former cop, we are slowly teased with more details behind his leaving the police force in 1991, though we know they involve a few (too many) drinks and a shootout with some criminals committing an armed hold-up. Though his accent is as back and forth between New Yorker and Northern Irish as usual, Neeson provides a formidable and capable presence – savvy and grizzled, yet weighed with a sense of regret and sadness at his past.
An acquaintance from his regularly attended AA meetings, Frank (Boyd Holbrook), asks him to go and see his brother Kenny (Dan Stevens). Scudder visits Kenny and is told that Kenny’s wife was kidnapped and held for ransom, and despite the ransom being paid, she was returned to him in several body bags. Kenny is out for revenge against the perpetrators, and enlists Scudder to help him track them down. After deducing that Kenny is a large scale heroin dealer, Scudder refuses, until Kenny plays him a horrific tape sent to him by the kidnappers, which plays the disturbing sounds of his wife’s murder. British actor Dan Stevens is solid as Kenny, playing him with a quiet intensity with a lethal edge slowly boiling away underneath. His accent is unsurprisingly miles ahead of his veteran co-star’s too.
Going to work, Scudder delves into a mystery which peels away quite quickly, as he locates the men responsible and their modus operandi – they have DEA ties helping them locate major drug dealers, who they then target knowing they will have significant cash reservoirs at hand. Without going much further into spoiler territory concerning the procedural aspect, there is plenty of darkness and grit at the heart of this picture. An antagonist says early on that ‘people are scared of all the wrong things’, and I have to agree – the actions of the kidnappers are horrific in their conception, though predominantly left to the imagination on screen.
Writer-director Scott Frank adapts the novel of the same name from author Lawrence Block, one of a series of books starring Scudder (and potentially then a franchise-starting film). Predominantly a screenwriter, Frank has a firm grasp of his characters and crafts some alternatingly terse and wry dialogue. As a director, he seems to add little to the script that would not have been on the page, but does nothing particularly off-putting either. He does admittedly get the best from his decent cast however. Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. seems to make a slight misstep here after his brilliant work on ‘The Master’, and the film looks oddly efficient yet manufactured – though I concede it is possible that this was the appropriate aesthetic for the film’s troubling themes.
In the supporting cast, newcomer Brian ‘Astro’ Bradley is impressively street smart and funny as a young homeless boy TJ with whom Scudder strikes up a friendship, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is similarly brilliant as a mentally handicapped groundskeeper who provides some pivotal information assisting Scudder’s enquiries. Editor Jill Savitt also does a commendable job, particularly in a montage contrasting Scudder collating intel about the kidnappers doing their best to cover their trail.
As it draws inexorably to its bloody conclusion, ‘A Walk Among The Tombstones’ delivers what you expect from the genre: violence, gunplay, twists, meditations on the folly of revenge and an in form Liam Neeson delivering some serious punches. Don’t expect much else though.
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