Marlowe Is a Hard-Boiled Headache
Writer Raymond Chandler’s original character Philip Marlowe, a gumshoe LA detective with a penchant for hard liquor and femme fatales, has graced the silver screen for 80 years via 11 film adaptations, brought to life in iconic performances from Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum (among others). Liam Neeson’s turn as the character in Neil Jordan’s Marlowe doesn’t even marginally compare to his predecessors. Despite their talent, Neeson and the rest of the promising cast fail to bring William Monahan’s script (and suspect source material) to life, and occasionally compelling visuals are undone by the misstep of having Barcelona and Dublin stand in for 1939 Los Angeles. The essence of Old Hollywood that the movie wishes to capture drains away.
The 70-year-old Neeson lacks both the physical stamina and charisma to pull off the Marlowe character; his fight and action sequences are sluggish and incredulous, and there’s zero chemistry between Marlowe and Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), the beautiful blond who hires him to investigate the sudden disappearance of her former lover Nico Peterson. When the man’s heavily mutilated body is found just off the grounds of the ultra-exclusive Corbata Club, the two believe that there’s a conspiracy afoot. Marlowe uncovers a connection between Nico and “the Mexicans,” a vague crime syndicate that predictably smuggles drugs across the border. Realizing that several parties wish Nico dead and don’t buy into his sudden expiration, Marlowe must race against time to find the man’s whereabouts and uncover whatever scandal that embroils him, before more people lose their lives. While Clare doggedly pursues a tryst with the detective, so does her mother Dorothy (Jessica Lange), an aging starlet who believes that her daughter might be more involved in Nico’s disappearance than she lets on.
Perhaps the first hint that Marlowe would inevitably pale in comparison to its cinematic precursors has to do with the film’s source novel. As opposed to formidable entries in the Phillip Marlowe canon like Murder, My Sweet, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, Marlowe is not actually adapted from a Raymond Chandler work, but from a recent John Banville novel “authorized” by the late writer’s estate. It’s unclear if this creative decision has anything to do with the fact that Marlowe is so uncharacteristically mellow in this version — Neeson doesn’t capture his whiskey-guzzling, flirtatious bachelor spirit, and barely convinces that he can successfully throw a punch, either. The choreography does little to refute the idea that his on-screen opponents were simply commanded to stand near-frozen until Neeson could boink them over the head or shoot a slug into their foot.