Directed by:
Scott FrankScreenplay:
Scott FrankCinematography:
Mihai Malaimare Jr.Composer:
Carlos Rafael RiveraCast:
Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Boyd Holbrook, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Astro, Mark Consuelos, Adam David Thompson, Sebastian Roché, Laura Birn (more)VOD (2)
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A Walk among the Tombstones stars Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-NYPD cop who now works as an unlicensed private investigator operating just outside the law. When Scudder reluctantly agrees to help a heroin trafficker (Dan Stevens) hunt down the men who kidnapped and then brutally murdered his wife, the PI learns that this is not the first time these men have committed this sort of twisted crime...nor will it be the last. Blurring the lines between right and wrong, Scudder races to track the deviants through the backstreets of New York City before they kill again. (Universal Pictures US)
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Reviews (10)
A sleek dark crime movie with a convincing Liam Neeson, fairly good villains, and excellent 1990s noir atmosphere and locations. The cold city full of weirdos and killers is often more attractive than the actors and their dialogues. The whole thing is oddly moderate, slow and deliberate, and at times you can see an interesting mix of cynicism, calmness, and brutality. There’s one or two good action scenes, but they far from being the main element of the film. It may seem like a quick money-making flick, but it is not, it’s an honest and carefully crafted piece of filmmaking.
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A well-made action film bordering on a film noir that keeps up its suspenseful atmosphere from start to finish. Although there are fewer gunfights compared to other Neeson films, it’s not a bad thing in this case. The film has a good atmosphere and steers clear of unnecessary sentimentality and pathos, so I greatly enjoyed it.
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A Walk Among the Tombstones is a noir film for people who don't know all that much about noir films and badly want for them to be like this. I don't hold any major grudge against it, and after the prologue (a smoke-filled morning bar, haggard bartender in the background, the shot through the coat, a scruffy Neeson and his drunkard’s dance on the stairs) I even found myself thinking I might love the film, but then the individual flaws began to line up behind each other at an increasingly less tolerable frequency. There are an awful lot of unnecessary characters who are given way too much space, a lot of the actors are obviously quite badly miscast (Dan Stevens, Sebastian Roché), and there are some merciless screenwriting perversions in an attempt to justify their existence in the film ("Dani here has a sniper rifle, but he's short-sighted, so give it to the junkie here who goes to AA meetings with Neeson and has been weaving her way into the frame so we can get some closure"). Besides, the early unmasking of the central killer duo made it impossible for me to stop thinking about Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which worked incredibly better with this motif.
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Liam Neeson again plays a first-class ass-kicker, but unlike Bill Marks, his character has overcome alcoholism (emphasised here more than in the book) and, unlike Bryan Mills, he makes more room for psychology and diplomacy. For a viewer wanting another furious action spectacle, it may even seem that Oskar Schindler will talk the violent psychopaths to death. Personally, I welcomed the consistency of the hard-boiled stylisation, even though it involves reducing women to the status of passive victims. After brutal sexual crimes have been perpetrated against them, the men can avenge them and, in a certain sense, thus redeem themselves (the motif of redemption is quite forcefully pushed into the foreground in the climax, when we have to listen to all twelve steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous programme). Women’s suffering serves only as a pretext for heroic deeds and the moral purification of flawed men. The only relatively active female character from the book (Scudder’s girlfriend, Elaine) was cut out of the film in the interest of better narrative flow. Of course, classic noir films weren’t any more considerate in their handling of female characters, but wouldn’t it have been enough to emulate the classics only at the style level? With its longer, mostly static shots and claustrophobic compositions together with muted colours and a gloomy soundtrack, that style elicits the need to escape into another, more colourful and kinder world. However, the image of a corrupt society with twisted values is taken to such an extreme that the film’s most appealing scenes are the perverted fantasies of serial killers (we see the first one in the opening credits). Such a film naturally cannot have a happy ending, though the last scene may at first give the impression that it will. However, in the context of the immediately preceding events, which most radically deviate from the book (apparently because of the more active role given to Scudder, whose character is otherwise paradoxically based on the passive acceptance of violence), the “superhero” aspect mainly raises concerns about whether there is a way out of the endless cycle of violence that only inspires more such behaviour. 75%
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Liam Neeson is a contemporary action hero, and what can we say, the role suits him- age-wise, one would think he's a bit past his prime, but no way. He keeps proving that he chose the action-hero path at the very first moment. The film is suspenseful, with quite interesting twists, definitely above average, but not action-packed elite.
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