'A Walk Among the Tombstones': Sad cop vs. really bad guys
Liam Neeson doesn't do the impossible in A Walk Among the Tombstones. No fending off hordes of Albanian sex-traffickers, no rooftop chases around Istanbul, no life-saving heroics 40,000 feet in the air. In fact, in this moodily suspenseful, seriously grisly adaptation of the Lawrence Block mystery, Neeson's Matthew Scudder - an ex-cop private eye with an AA medallion commemorating eight years of sobriety - can barely keep up with the bad guys.
Liam Neeson doesn't do the impossible in A Walk Among the Tombstones. No fending off hordes of Albanian sex-traffickers, no rooftop chases around Istanbul, no life-saving heroics 40,000 feet in the air. In fact, in this moodily suspenseful, seriously grisly adaptation of the Lawrence Block mystery, Neeson's Matthew Scudder - an ex-cop private eye with an AA medallion commemorating eight years of sobriety - can barely keep up with the bad guys.
And they are truly bad: a creepy duo who have kidnapped a drug-dealer's wife, extorted $400,000 ransom, then killed the beautiful missus anyway, leaving her body parts in the trunk of an abandoned car.
It's not the sort of job that Scudder - unlicensed as a P.I., still brandishing his NYPD badge when he needs to impress - usually takes. But rightly troubled spouse Kenny Kristo (played with unrecognizable icy cool by Dan Stevens, a.k.a. that sappy blueblood Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey) makes a compelling case, and Scudder accepts the assignment. First things first: off to look up newspaper stories about abducted women on the library's microfiche. (OK, it's set in 1999, with lots of worry about a Y2K crash. But still, kind of quaint.)
A Walk Among the Tombstones was scripted and directed by Scott Frank, who crafted one of the best of all Elmore Leonard adaptations (Out of Sight, for Steven Soderbergh) and whose directing debut, 2007's The Lookout, was a satisfyingly noir-ish heist caper starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Here, he gets Neeson to do a convincing New York accent, and to walk around with a hangdog look and hulking gait. The actor's Scudder spends a lot of time nursing mugs of coffee in diner booths, and nursing old wounds from his boozing and shooting-at-gang-bangers days. But he's a good cop, and knows how to follow leads, dig for clues, and extract information from folks who maybe don't want to share.
It doesn't take long for Scudder to realize that the abduction and deadly degradation of Mrs. Kristo was not a one-off deal. These guys (Sebastian Roché, Adam David Thompson) are serial predators. And before Scudder (with some help from Brian "Astro" Bradley, as a homeless teen) can catch up with the jumpsuited perps in their windowless van, other women have been grabbed off the street, taken to a grim basement, abused, and killed.
A Walk Among the Tombstones isn't jolly stuff. It has the steady pace of a police procedural, with a flawed but noble hero and the colorful lowlifes that populate any hard-boiled mystery scribe's world. Its window into the lives of the sick and sociopathic is creepy and explicit, but not terribly probing. Psychological motivations are unimportant.
The motives of Neeson's Matthew Scudder, on the other hand, are very much a concern. We want to see him gain some kind of victory, even if tainted with blood and regret.
A Walk Among the Tombstones *** (Out of four stars)
Directed by Scott Frank. With Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, Sebastian Roché, Brian "Astro" Bradley. Distributed by Universal Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 53 mins.
Parent's guide: R (violence, sexual violence, profanity, nudity, adult themes).
Playing at: area theaters.EndText
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