A Walk Among the Tombstones
Director: Scott Frank
Starring: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens
★★ (out of five)
“MY job is doing favours for people; in return they give me gifts.”
This is how tough-guy private eye Matt Scudder explains his modus operandi in Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, a movie that extends the apparently relentless rise of Liam Neeson’s megastar action-man profile.
For anyone who followed Neeson’s early acting career it is still somewhat perplexing to see him jumping around the place and going bang-bang. We see him so often with a gun in his hand these days that it’s weird to recall that Neeson made his mark in movies like Colin Gregg’s touching human drama Lamb (1985).
For decades he confounded the expectations that might have been placed upon a 6' 4'' broth of a boy from Ballymena, dexterously playing roles as earnest and varied as Oscar Schindler, Alfred Kinsey and Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1998). Neeson even appeared in a Woody Allen movie (Husbands and Wives, 1992), the stamp of any sensitive or sophisticated actor.
Yet, he’s now seen so often flourishing a weapon (or a “piece”, in the American vernacular) and reappears so frequently in his hard-man roles, we can separate them into two categories — the respectable and the wretched.
For instance, as Bryan Mills in the ongoing Taken franchise (episode three coming up) or as the scholarly Martin Harris in Unknown (2011), he is the morally upstanding figure forced into violence by circumstance. By contrast, as the existentially isolated hunter Ottway in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey (2011), he is the lonely and marginalised outsider using brutality as a wild survival instinct.
In A Walk Among the Tombstones Neeson is in this second category. As the down-at-heel Scudder he is a disgraced former cop who wanders from dive to dive, seeing life through a whiskey bottle and scratching a living working for the shadiest people.
When Scudder is hired to find the missing wife of a high-level heroin dealer (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens — another “softy” playing hardball), he’s led down to a level of Hell even he has not visited before. His quest to catch the bad guys, however, does offer him the chance to restore something of his decaying dignity.
Scudder does not belong in the class of iconic American detectives who seek some inner relief from mysterious melancholy. We could remember Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) in Jacques Tourneur’s classic Out of the Past (1947), or the modern Faustus Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987).
The exemplar in this line, of course, is Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Polanski’s Chinatown (1973). These ambiguous anti-heroes are confronted by demons they can hear but cannot see. Scudder does not have such levels of complexity.
Though Neeson does a perfectly fine job of playing the role, he is always treading water. It’s been said that for these macho characters he’s phoning-in the performances and it’s hard to argue with that observation. Neeson is keeping busy and boosting the bank balance, and who’d blame him?
But for all the blockbusting sound and fury in Neeson’s recent work, nothing is as compelling as the visceral violence that erupts between himself and James Nesbitt in the post-Peace Process drama Five Minutes of Heaven (2009). As men haunted by their sectarian past there is something expressively symbolic when they fight and tumble through a derelict window frame, crashing to the pavement in splintered glass and broken timber.
He’s now working on Martin Scorsese’s new project, playing a 17th-century Jesuit priest, which sounds a bit more like the real Neeson.
Meanwhile, A Walk Among the Tombstones has all the elements of solid action thrillers — punching, grimacing, shouting and shooting. If you like that sort of thing, it won’t disappoint.
A Walk Among The Tombstones is released in cinemas nationwide this Friday
