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).
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).
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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