20
Sep/14

A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

20
Sep/14
Unlicensed PI Matthew Scudder (Liam Neeson) searches Red Hook for clues to serial killings in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

Unlicensed P.I. Matthew Scudder (Liam Neeson) searches for clues in Red Hook in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES (Scott Frank, 2014)
Opens Friday, September 19
www.awalkamongthetombstones.net

Irish thespian Liam Neeson’s rebirth as an action star continues with the gritty New York City-set thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones. Based on Edgar Award winner Lawrence Block’s tenth of seventeen novels about Matthew Scudder, a former NYPD detective and recovering alcoholic, the film follows Scudder as he reluctantly gets hired to find a pair of killers who are kidnapping relatives of drug dealers, collecting large ransoms, and mutilating the bodies anyway, purely for pleasure. Fellow AA member Peter Kristo (Boyd Holbrook) introduces Scudder to his brother, stylish Brooklyn drug kingpin Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens), who wants Scudder to find the two men who brutally cut up his wife. Soon the unlicensed private investigator is on the hunt for Ray (David Harbour) and Albert (Adam David Thompson), taking him from Red Hook to Green-Wood Cemetery to Washington Heights as he pursues the stealthy, dangerous madmen. He is occasionally accompanied by the young TJ (Brownsville-born rapper Brian “Astro” Bradley), a homeless teen he met in the library. (The story takes place in 1999 as Y2K approaches; ever old-fashioned and traditional, Scudder is looking for information in the library using microfiche.) But the game changes when Russian drug dealer Yuri Landau (Sebastian Roché) needs Scudder to help find his kidnapped daughter, reminding Scudder of the incident from his past that led to his quitting the force and the bottle.

Scudder (Liam Neeson) gets unwanted help from TJ (rapper Brian “Astro” Bradley) in thriller based on Lawrence Block novel

Scudder (Liam Neeson) gets unwanted help from TJ (rapper Brian “Astro” Bradley) in thriller based on Lawrence Block novel

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a gripping thriller in which Neeson and Frank (the screenwriter of Get Shorty and Out of Sight and writer-director of The Lookout) manage to get past at least three potential problems that could have dragged the film down to the level of the previous Scudder movie project, Hal Ashby’s 1986 dud Eight Million Ways to Die, in which Jeff Bridges portrayed the P.I. First, this is yet another film about men butchering women, with no fully developed female characters. Second, TJ’s necessity in the story is tenuous at best, especially when he becomes an annoying red herring. And third, the AA aspects threaten to derail the ending. But Neeson, fitting neatly in the action void between Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford (in fact, about a dozen years ago Ford was attached to the project), gives an unpredictable depth to Scudder, who seems to be merely passing through life, involved only when he feels like it, a lost loner with no friends or relatives that matter to him. He does what he wants and says what he thinks, with a rather limited sense of humor, though he is occasionally very funny nonetheless. It’s hard not to be transfixed by Neeson’s unflinching performance as he wanders the streets of the city, looking for answers that will never come.