A Walk Among the Tombstones
Director: Scott Frank
Talent: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Maurice Compte
Release Date: 19th September 2014
They don’t make noir properly any more. What they do make properly is crypto-fascist and violently misogynistic revenge thrillers that borrow the iconography of a genre, and a period in time, where despair could be borne witness to with clarity and real aesthetic vision, before it began to seep into the texture of everything, cataracting the collective imagination in line with social forces, creating worlds in which only suffering is possible — the suffering of women, and of children — and violence ultimately delimits thought and understanding. A Walk Among the Tombstones main problem is that it is ponderously, remarkably stupid. Its exhilarating opening sequence — a flashback to a fatal gunfight and pursuit which looks and sounds genuinely wonderful, like William Friedkin doing Dirty Harry — gives way to an uninspired serial kidnap-ransom-murder investigation conducted by a Liam Neeson too jaded to kick anyone’s ass even once. Dire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ttj9tXzCA
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
