Private investigator Matthew Scudder is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife.
Like a good butcher’s cleaver, it’s weighty, solid and sharp — an effective matching of director and star in what is hopefully the first of a new film series.
Exciting, in places, though a stranger to subtlety, it ticks all the genre boxes, but there’s something about its knowing noirisms that feels superficial rather than soaked-in.
With references to Philip Marlowe and discussion of what it takes to make a good detective it's clear Frank intends Scudder to become a household name but, given this dodgy effort, that may never happen. Although to be fair it does work better than the previous attempt to bring Scudder to the big screen: Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die.
Liam Neeson’s mission to rebrand himself as a 21st-century Charles Bronson continues apace in the course of this reductive, bone-headed detective yarn, adapted from the Lawrence Block bestseller and lining up tabloid street-scum like so many clay pigeons.
In the end A Walk Among The Tombstones is more like a dutiful plod through all the familiar cliches of hardboiled crime fiction.
A basically enjoyable first opening act cooks up a variety of red herrings that the rest of the film throws straight in the bin.
Liam Neeson reprises his hangdog action-hero routine as Matt Scudder, an ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, in Scott Frank's plodding 1990s-set adaptation of one of Lawrence Block's crime novels.
Liam Neeson is in vigilante mode once again as the private detective in this head-bangingly dull thriller.
A Walk Among the Tombstones proves the gumshoe still has legs.
A gripping story of bent cops and straight thugs, there are worse ways of cuffing your attention to an old-school star.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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