A Walk Among the Tombstones is not just another Taken-esque movie starring Liam Neeson, even if the marketing may suggest as much. Instead, writer/director Scott Frank (The Lookout) has crafted something of an old school noir based on the best-selling novel by Lawrence Block in which Neeson plays a private investigator on the trail of a pair of demented serial killers who take pleasure in kidnapping and dismembering their female victims. Why? Because they’re just body parts.
Neeson plays Matt Scudder, an eight years sober ex-detective turned paid-under-the-table, private investigator. Matt has just been approached by a man (Dan Stevens) whose wife was kidnapped and killed, even though he paid the $400,000 ransom. She isn’t the first woman the film’s two villains (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) have killed and she isn’t likely to be the last as they prey on a specific kind of victim, one that’s more likely to pay while, at the same time, unlikely to go to the cops.
Following an opening scene set in 1991, the film takes place in 1999 and chooses to constantly focus on the Y2K threat around every corner, for what reason I’m still not entirely sure. Matt isn’t tech-savvy, that’s for sure. He doesn’t carry a cell phone and while doing a little research on microfiche in the library he ultimately meets TJ (played by “The X Factor” contestant Brian ‘Astro’ Bradley), a chatty homeless kid that helps Matt with the Internet, street slang and knows a little bit of German. To be honest, the kid is kind of a problem, but at the same time I liked a little bit of the interaction between Matt and TJ, even if a lot of it could have been cut out in an effort to trim the film’s running time (did he really need to have sickle-cell anemia?), which is far too long for what we’re getting.
To that point, the film is in constant conflict with itself as many of the set ups are tiresome and cliched, but they are then saved thanks to the execution afterward. Toward the end of the film TJ injects himself into the climax in stereotypical fashion, which had me rolling my eyes, but from there things are handled in a way that keep you on edge.
The worst the film has to offer is voiceover reading off the guiding principles of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program as the action plays out during the film’s climax. There’s a similar lack of subtlety throughout that takes away from the drama. The bad guys are about as bad as they can get and we learn every little aspect of their depraved ways and to what end? An opening sequence is chilling enough as they run their sick hands over the body of one of their female victims, mouth taped shut, eyes wide open in terror and a tear roles down her face. To know what they do to their victims is enough and I wish Frank had kept them in the shadows a little more than he did.
I also got to thinking about how this may have worked had it been made in the mid-’40s and been presented in black-and-white. Does the addition of color take something away from noir thrillers, making them more real, eliminating the ease of letting certain things slide when they look as if they exist in a world unlike our own? I know a sense of realism can add to the terror in such a movie, and A Walk Among the Tombstones has a legitimate real world, street texture to it, but at the same time, the narrative feels like something contrived into existence rather than organic to something that would exist in our world.
Kudos, however, to Mihai Malaimare Jr.‘s cinematography, which is muted and restrained, never going for anything flashy. I particularly loved the stellar, ’70s-esque shot of Matt as he descends a long staircase during the film’s title sequence.
In terms of the screenplay, I don’t know how much of Scudder’s dialogue comes from Block’s book or what Frank wrote himself, but his interactions with the people in this world are the best the film has to offer. A frightened man approaches him with a giant knife, two men take to beating him with a baseball bat and another man points a loaded pistol at his face and yet Scudder doesn’t move, though he does have something to say every time and it’s most often great. Then again, an instance in which he’s talking about guns with TJ sounds more like a PSA than movie dialogue and, again, the reading of the 12-steps over the film’s climax was ill-conceived.
It’s easy to see why Frank has turned in a film that runs an hour and 53 minutes. He clearly liked a lot of what came after some of the weaker setups, but this is an example of a film where some of the good parts simply needed to be cut to save the film from itself. The relationship between Matt and TJ was clearly important to Frank, but it could have been tightened and the lackadaisical treatment of the film’s two villains is a bit confusing. We don’t get movies like this from studios very often so it’s nice to see the effort, and it definitely has that old school noir feel, but it overextends itself delivering an entertaining, but mixed bag in the end.
