The latest revival of Naked Gun succeeds largely because its star, Liam Neeson, arrives with a lifetime of dramatic heft similar to how Leslie Nielsen’s serious résumé made the original gag work. Neeson has long been associated with weighty, earnest roles, but his late-career reinvention was turbocharged after 2009’s Taken unexpectedly turned him into an action icon. That success spawned a string of similar thrillers — including two middling sequels — and showed the limits of the vengeful-expert premise as a sustained franchise. A few years before Taken 3 closed that particular chapter, Neeson starred in a film that might have served as a sturdier identity for his second act. Sadly, A Walk Among the Tombstones didn’t quite find the audience to cement that path.
In Frank’s adaptation, Neeson embodies Matt Scudder: a sober, ex-police detective created by Lawrence Block and previously seen in a loose screen incarnation of Eight Million Ways to Die. Scudder’s backstory is bruising and essential to his character — as a younger officer and struggling alcoholic he was present when a robbery turned lethal. After tracking the perpetrators, an errant bullet killed an innocent bystander; although he escaped official censure because the robbers fired first, Scudder left the force and now ekes out a living as an unlicensed private investigator whose methods are shaped by his own code of ethics.
There’s a family resemblance between Scudder and Bryan Mills — both are men with institutional training and a readiness for confrontation — but A Walk Among the Tombstones deliberately resists becoming a straight action picture. When Scudder is asked by an AA acquaintance, Peter (Boyd Holbrook), to help trace the killers who murdered Peter’s wealthy dealer brother Kenny’s (Dan Stevens) wife, Neeson’s approach is investigative rather than immediately vengeful. The film unfolds as a procedural inquiry that gradually escalates into real danger; the antagonists are disturbingly effective, and the moments of menace land because director Scott Frank so meticulously builds atmosphere. Where the Taken films favored kinetic retribution, Frank favors mood — and Neeson’s frostier, world-weary presence fits that palette perfectly. He even gets a quietly comic, brutal-through-the-window punch that feels earned by the performance’s understatement.
Image: Universal PicturesThe film also functions as a period piece: it’s rooted in 1999 New York, with touches of Y2K anxiety and an amusing scene where Scudder enlists help from a homeless teen, T.J. (Brian “Astro” Bradley), who confuses a website for a desktop program. That near–millennial setting gives the movie a pre-gentrification Brooklyn texture and allows Frank to shoot in evocative locations like Green-Wood Cemetery. Much of the film luxuriates in shadow and low light, channeling classic noir, but the gallery of characters Scudder encounters are, if anything, more melancholy than the archetypal noir cast. The serial-killer subplot is gruesome enough that it threatens to tip the tone, yet the filmmaking generally keeps it anchored in a mournful register rather than pure shock.
That noir sensibility complements the particular brand of remorse Neeson often brings to his characters — something largely absent from the blunt righteous fury of the Taken franchise. In spirit, A Walk Among the Tombstones is closer to some of Neeson’s collaborations with Jaume Collet-Serra, films in which his protagonists tend to be haunted and self-destructive, albeit rendered with a lighter touch. Frank — whose résumé includes work as a screenwriter on projects like Out of Sight, contributions to action franchises, and the creation of recent series such as Monsieur Spade and Dept. Q — clearly delights in the scaffolding of noir, but refuses to deliver a mere genre exercise. Instead, the film reads as a story of recovery: Scudder isn’t depicted as battling visible cravings so much as learning how to rebuild a life without the twin pillars of alcohol and police authority.
Image: Universal PicturesIn that restrained, rueful mode, Scudder could have served as a rich recurring vehicle for Neeson’s late-career persona — much as Denzel Washington’s Easy Rawlins once seemed poised for an ongoing noir series after Devil in a Blue Dress. A Walk Among the Tombstones doesn’t quite reach that canonical noir benchmark, but it sits near the same vein of efficient, no-frills craftsmanship as Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher: muscular, economical filmmaking with a laconic lead. Cruise ultimately didn’t need Reacher to anchor a long-running franchise, but Neeson’s Scudder felt like a character who could plausibly keep digging into New York’s unsolved mysteries for years — and when the material grows bleak, a respite in the style of Frank Drebin wouldn’t be unwelcome.
A Walk Among the Tombstones is currently streaming on Paramount Plus.
Source: Polygon
