Fans of the hardboiled detective,
rejoice. Screenwriter-director Scott Frank and actor Liam Neeson, adapting the
splendid work of crime novelist Lawrence Block, have brought a great one to the
screen in high, bracing style. “A Walk Among The Tombstones” not only does
justice to one of Block’s most soulful creations, ex-cop and recovering alcoholic
turned very unlicensed private dick (“I do favors for people, and they give me
gifts,” is how he puts it) Matthew Scudder, it stages, single-handed, a bracing
revival of a kind of genre movie that many of us have been mourning. That is, a
crime drama that isn’t all bang-bang and chop-chop. Not that such movies don’t
offer their pleasures. Hell, Liam Neeson himself has been a welcome feature in
many of them. But fans of the likes of “Jackie Brown” and “Out of Sight,” not
to mention older, more classical fare such as “The Maltese Falcon,” “Murder, My
Sweet,” etc., have been feeling pretty starved in the contemporary movie
climate. “A Walk Among The Tombstones” provides us a very substantial meal.
The movie begins in 1991, depicting
a very bad day for still-on-the-force Scudder, in a scene of brutal intensity
and surprise. It’s not the first such scene. After moving to 1999, and a New
York City rather amusingly in the grip of Y2K panic, and a sober and dour
Scudder getting reluctantly drawn into a peculiar kidnap-and-murder case,
director Frank keeps the tension at a steady, insistent simmer even as he’s
carefully building his characters. When things come to a boil, Frank doesn’t
kid around. The story revolves around a couple of sickos who’ve been making sport
of kidnapping and ransoming the wives of various drug dealers and traffickers
in the city. Because their prey are related to criminals, bringing the police
in is a vexed option for the victims; and because the bad guys are sickos, once
they get their loot they don’t return the victim. It’s an even more twisted
operation than what I’m describing, and Frank depicts just enough of the
details to get the viewer’s stomach churning, and also to understand the anger
and indignation building up in the ever-stoic Scudder, whose personal hell can
only be kept at bay by not succumbing to those emotions. As the kidnappers up
the ante and make their latest victim a 13-year-old daughter of a drug
kingpin…well, the whole thing is likely to cause dropped jaws and possibly
detached movie theater armrests.
This isn’t the first time Scudder’s
been portrayed on screen: that was in the sadly misbegotten 1986 Oliver
Stone/Hal Ashby collaboration “Eight Million Ways To Die.” “Tombstones” reboots
the character and gets him right. Not just physically. Neeson captures
Scudder’s toughness, intelligence, world-weariness, but also his humanity and
humor. Doing research for the case, Scudder encounters an African-American
homeless teen named T.J. (nicely played by Brian “Astro” Bradley), with whom he
strikes up an unlikely but ultimately affecting friendship, making the kid a
sidekick of sorts; the movie depicts their affinity in a way that’s utterly
unpatronizing and convincing. Frank also takes real risks in the movie’s
climactic showdown scene; instead of staging a straightforward action set
piece, he staggers the events and intercuts them with a defining scene in
Scudder’s development as a person. The movie ponders how Scudder’s spirituality
will hold up under exposure to a particularly monumental example of evil.
Movies such as “Taken,” as diverting as they can be, don’t ask the viewer to be
concerned for the soul of the protagonist. “A Walk Among The Tombstones” does,
and so besides being a dynamite thriller, it gives something not insubstantial
as an extra.
Source:: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-walk-among-the-tombstones-2014
