A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES  3.0***

            Liam Neeson would like to have a word with the man who said there were no second chances for a 62-year-old actor in Hollywood.  Neeson is in the midst of one of the most remarkable second chances in movie history ( but 1^st place would go to Robert Downey). This Academy Award nominee, previously known more for his prestigious résumé than his prodigious muscles, is the biggest and most consistent ass-kicker in Hollywood. If the Liam Neeson of today starred in a movie called Schindler’s List, fans who only know him from his recent work would assume it was a high-octane action thriller about a hit man named Schindler systematically working his way through a “list” of the men who murdered his family. Neeson’s latest effort ( his 5^th action film since starting with “Taken”)  is slightly more subdued than his average shoot-’em-up, but no less satisfying.

Neeson stars as an ex-cop-turned-unlicensed-private-eye, Matthew Scudder, who retired from the force following a shoot-out-gone-bad, and is earning a meager living as a detective. He’s called to the lavishly appointed home of Kenny, a drug dealer, whose wife was  kidnapped and held for ransom. At first Scudder refuses  but then agrees to take the case after  Kenny explains that he’s already handed over the ransom ( his life savings) to the kidnappers who killed his wife anyway and chopped her up into small pieces.   What follows contains no wild plot twists or complicated story line, just good old-fashioned detective work in some of the less glamorous corners of New York City: musty libraries and dingy diners, church basements and vacant lots, and for several key sequences, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.   Even with a foreigner like Neeson and some of the other cast members ____ who, to their credit, manage totally passable Noo Yawk accents—the movie is shot through and through with an authentic Big Apple vibe.

A Walk Among The Tombstones will probably do no better than modest business in theaters. It will certainly win no Oscar nominations.  But it’s the sort of modest yet thoroughly satisfying potboiler that, with time, begins to accrue a reputation among aficionados as a minor classic of its genre.  

Rated R for strong violence, disturbing images, language and brief nudity.

 

Clark

 

PS: You could wait for this to come out on Netflix or Redbox.