A Walk Among the Tombstones 2014

This movie had quite some premise and it is a decent enough movie but, sadly, it never really rises out of the ordinary. We have some really despicable criminals and I mean some real creepy nutcases and we have Liam Neeson as a gritty former cop turned private investigator. Good recipe to start with I would say.

Unfortunately it never really took off. Liam Neeson is doing a good job of portraying the former cop and he is pretty much making the picture. The creepy guys are, well creepy but they never really get to shine in their creepiness. Most of the other characters around are just decoration with the possible exception of the young brat whom I personally just found annoying.

Speaking of annoying I have to say that the AA sessions and the voice overs from them pretty much falls into that very category. They felt at best like unnecessary fillers to me. I do not know why it is so popular to portray “heroes” as drunks or former drunks.

The movie is not a quick paced one. It is more of a thriller than a action one although there are a few outbursts of action. Sometimes it goes quite far down the road of some real detective work and sometimes it just jumps about leaving a few inconsistencies and plot wholes hanging around.

I would say that this movie is a fairly ordinary, good but nothing special, crime story about two psychopaths and a gritty former coop given the task of chasing them down. Without Liam Neeson as a lead actor more or less carrying the movie along it would have been a fairly bland movie.

Another recycled story over and over again, without any freshness, where Liam Neeson returns to be the defender who does not forgive! A Walk Among the Tombstones is a big of a mess with huge plot holes but strangely manages to have something interesting for you, due to some elements that can give the impression that we are see a film noir, through its visual style and characters in a desperate outlaw world. But that alone is not enough to make it a good film.

This film, based on the bestseller by Lawrence Block, tells the story of an ex-cop and private investigator Matthew Scudder, hired by a dealer to find out who kidnapped and killed his wife. The action takes place in the 90s in New York but there's any references about it, I never felt that in the atmosphere. New York always has an imposing presence. It's always "the" city which itself becomes one of the characters, in this case it does not. All characters are poorly developed and basically there is no suspense it's fairly easy to predict what comes next. The villains of the story are certainly creepy and some of its scenes can even be minimally disturbing, but as all the characters, they were super underused.

Liam Neeson, a good actor who already deserves good roles (again!) where we could see the good potential that he always had being well spent! But it seems to me that it will not be soon, because his next film will be the third film od the franchise Taken - more of the same - but what is certain is that even predicting that such films will give us, we always end up having an interest in seeing all that this gentleman does.

We reached the end of A Walk Among the Tombstones and the only thing that remains is an empty feeling. One of those films that quickly fall into oblivion.