Movie Review: A Walk Among the Tombstones
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
A Walk Among the Tombstones is a tidy, character-forward procedural offering up Liam Neeson in this year’s second “Liam Neeson movie” working in a more somber, less super-heroic mode than in Non-Stop or the Taken bonanza. A Walk Among the Tombstones finds haunted P.I. Matthew Scudder hunting a couple of sick slashers targeting 1990s New York women in a grim but engrossing dot-connector the likes of which you have certainly seen before, yet is still worth a run due to a well-casted ensemble and the elegant filmmaking of writer/director Scott Frank (he also scripted Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Minority Report) and cinematographer Mihai Malamaire (D.P. on The Master, so that’s enough of a draw for me).
Coming from the raw world of pulp novelist Lawrence Block, the milieu is grim, the violence deeply unpleasant and misogynistic, but A Walk Among the Tombstones works as a retread 1980s-style thriller down to Scudder’s too-smart street-kid sidekick and banding with drug dealers to go after the psychos kidnapping and killing the dealer’s wives — the he plot is 10:00pm TV playbook with a few horror elements to keep the R-rating hard. Even though we have been spoiled with the complexities of True Detective and other new breed crime series, I can still enjoy a crusty, heart-thumping potboiler like this film. I just probably will not ever feel the urge to watch it again: there’s no heavy resonance or dilemma in that James Ellroy way or invigorating tossed banter and clever turns like an Elmore Leonard yarn (A Walk Among the Tombstones doesn’t get near the heights of Frank’s two Leonard adaptations made by better directors; those films found a stronger balance between shambling humanity and crisp plotting to become the classics that this never will).
Compensating for following the simplistic moral vengeance rulebook, the picture tries to reason with itself that it has a higher purpose (one nuanced in Block’s novels and reduced here); in fact the movie is merely a solid gory gumshoe ride with a potent bookend flashback and a blue AA book in pocket to give the hero shallow depth (a melodramatic voiceover at a key moment reveals the limits of the movie’s psychology).
Liam Neeson in “A Walk Among the Tombstones.” © 2014 – Universal Pictures.
Neeson’s gravity is a better fit for the character than his first film outing: the 1980s coke bomb 8 Million Ways to Die, with Jeff Bridges aimless as Scudder. Hard-worn but still capable of sentiment, Neeson doesn’t show a glint the way Eastwood does or reach the hard-boiling points of Lee Marvin and his ilk, but does bring a grounded realism to the snug role of retired Irish cop with a moral compass; his command kept me involved throughout the series of convolutions and conversations that lead A Walk Among the Tombstones to its redemptive showdowns.
Allusions to Y2K and the NYC boroughs before gentrification suggest a societal anxiety that the strict compositional lensing of this Universal franchise-setter does not explore beyond functioning as a vague, paranoid red herring backdrop.
Handsome and downbeat, A Walk Among the Tombstones is a good dad movie with some pretty squirmy-pervy murders, an excellent sequence on a rooftop, and another round of grizzled warnings and wisdom from Neeson.
Gregory Fichter
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