Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
Written by Steven Bielefield
I’m pretty sure Liam Neeson is just tired now. He certainly seems to have the same exhausted look ever since Schindler’s List. Maybe it’s just the fact that he seems to be getting typecast recently in action movies, or maybe it’s the fact that he is as old as many grandparents nowadays. But it seems that he’s fatigued from all of the running and fighting in the Taken movies, so he decided to do a movie where he spends most of it briskly walking. Hence, A Walk Among the Tombstones.
Liam Neeson plays Matt Scudder, a former NYPD officer who now works as a private investigator. A man named Kenny hires Scudder to find his kidnapped wife, who is being held for ransom. Scudder rushes to find the kidnappers before they horrifically murder Kenny’s wife.
Now, is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like the plot to Taken? Seriously, it’s like a find-and-replace was done on Taken’s script. Replace “Matt Scudder” with “Bryan Mills,” “Kenny’s wife” with “Bryan’s daughter,” “NYPD Officer” with “CIA Agent,” and “murder” with “sell into sex slavery,” and you’ve turned A Walk Among the Tombstones back into Taken. Maybe the scripts for the two movies got mixed up or something.
Admittedly, aside from basic similarities, the two plots are different, but man, it seems Liam Neeson can’t get away from rescuing kidnapped women. The movie can still be good, despite being similar to other films, if it does something new with the concept. So does it do that? Well… not exactly.
Okay, before we get too far into the not-so-good, let’s take a moment to recognize the good in this film. Liam Neeson is, as per usual, compelling in his role, and the rest of the cast are quite good in their roles as well. The movie is slower paced than normal, and while it can get a bit dull at times, I like the slower take as opposed to the million-miles-per-hour pace of most films nowadays. There is a lot of great usage of suspense and several film-noir tropes, and the film overall keeps your attention well.
The only other real issue with the plot is that, well, it falls into the classic clichés of mystery and suspense films. You may not know the exact details, but you can fairly accurately predict how the film will go, and this combines with the slower pace to make the film a little boring at times. Maybe this is to be expected of an adaptation of a novel from 1992, but that’s an issue that should be fixed in rewrites. In order to stand out, a film must surprise in some way, and this doesn’t.
All that said, A Walk Among the Tombstones is a quite entertaining film. Neeson’s performance is compelling, and while it falls into the clichés of its genre, it’s still enjoyable and tense. And if you need a break from the typical action movies Neeson does (at least until Taken 3), this is a good movie in his filmography.
