In director Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, Liam Neeson once again demonstrates that he’s an actor with a certain set of skills. And those skills—the ability to kick ass while remaining cool, calm and emotionally detached—have turned up repeatedly in recent offerings like Non-Stop and the Taken films. In fact, his characters of late are nearly downright interchangeable. Thankfully, though, the stories are a little different so Neeson can tweak the brooding meter on his performances.
This time around, Neeson plays Matt Scudder, an ex-NYPD cop and recovering alcoholic with a tortured past. (This is slightly different from Bill Marks, the air marshal Neeson played in Non-Stop; Marks also had a tortured past, but was in the full-throes of his addiction.) Scudder’s now working as an unlicensed private detective, allowing him to skirt the law when necessary, much like Bryan Mills, Neeson’s ex-CIA character in the Taken series.
Scudder is solicited by one of his fellow AA members to help Kenny Kristo—played by Dan Stevens in a decidedly un-Downton Abbey role—with a problem that he can’t take to the police. Kenny is a heroin dealer whose wife had been kidnapped. Although he paid the ransom, the kidnappers murdered her anyway, and now Kenny wants to find the men responsible, using Scudder’s useful skill set. During the investigation, the PI learns that the kidnappers are serial killers, preying on the families of drug dealers.
Despite a visually interesting, but ultimately brutal, opening credit sequence, the film devolves into a conventional detective mystery that quickly becomes long in the tooth. The plot that quietly unfolds onscreen becomes unfocused and convoluted, with a requisite bloody red herring or two thrown in for good measure (that any discerning audience member would disregard immediately).
Although it clocks in at a little less than two hours, A Walk Among the Tombstones feels long—there are only so many times an audience can listen to or watch women get tortured. The film could have used another editing pass to excise a few of the more unnecessary moments, like the gratuitous final scenes, capped with a pedestrian wide shot of the Manhattan skyline at sunrise, with the Twin Towers in the distance. The film is set in the 1990s, and some of the visual queues are ridiculously in your face, so that no one forgets the film’s setting.