I don’t think A Walk Among the Tombstones would have worked as well as it does in today’s age of big budget CGI laden movies without Liam Neeson in the staring role. Without his fantastic performance as former NYPD cop, now unlicensed private investigator, Matt Scudder the film would all fall flat.
While Neeson still can’t quite capture the proper American accent, the character he plays is a welcome diversion from the aged action movie hero that he seems to be typecast in as of late. A Walk Among the Tombstones, at its heart, is a classic noir crime thriller that is visually stunning, but lacks the punch that a movie of its caliber once had, even say ten years ago.
This is clearly a world full of gray, where every character is flawed, or has major baggage that weighs heavily on their shoulders. Scudder is a man who works outside the law to bring justice to those who may need it, even if those people may in fact be drug traffickers. It a story about justice and redemption, with a plucky sidekick thrown in just for good measure.
Kenny Kristo (played by Dan Steves of Downton Abbey fame) reaches out to Scudder at an AA meeting (his alcoholism lead to him leaving the force of his own volition), and the two attend to help his well-to-do brother Kenny (Robert Boyd Holbrook). Scudder quickly comes to learn that Kenny is no ordinary man; instead we find out that he is a notorious drug trafficker whose wife has been kidnapped. Where the twist on the tired kidnapping convention comes into play is when he learns that while Kenny paid the ransom, his wife was murdered anyway. This leads to a ghoulish flashback in which we hear the depravity of these killers as they tortured and mutilated his wife before returning her in dozens of pieces.
A Walk Among the Tombstones is startlingly graphic, but not so much in a visual way. Apart from a few fight scenes that buffer the film’s opening and closing segments, most of the deaths caused by our antagonists are done just shy of the camera, leaving us to use our imaginations as to the pain involved. This is where the film works best as it plays upon our own fears, leaving it up to us to fill in the blanks, thus making it more emotionally shocking.
Aside from this shift from the norm, everything else in the film plays like you would expect. While the story is handled well, although you get the distinct feeling that a great many things are underexplained throughout the film. In classic noir conventions A Walk Among the Tombstones is more focused on setting and visuals than on involving you with the story. The bad guys aren’t a mystery to us for very long, there are no twists or turns in the story, we don’tget to see a man come to terms with his past, and on and on.
Ultimately though, I blame the state of modern television for most of the problems with this film. With so many standout shows touching on the darkness that is man (The Following, The Killing, True Detective, The Bridge and others) A Walk Among the Tombstones loses much of its punch and feels like it would have been better suited for a television series.
While it may not break the mold, it does do everything it sets out to do very well. The film is slow-paced, even with its under two-hour runtime, and will be easy for anyone to follow along with. The story might be simple by most people’s standards today, it still brings with it enough of a punch to pull it above becoming another mediocre and forgetable crime drama.
A Walk Among the Tombstones may feel dated and straightforward to many, but Liam Neeson does a marvelous acting job and saves the film from itself. If you love Liam Neeson you will definetly want to check the movie out, but if he isn’t your cup of tea, or the crime drama doesn’t interest you, you’ll do fine waiting until it hits Netflix.
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