A Walk Among the Tombstones

Liam Neeson is a contemporary action hero, and what can we say, the role suits him- age-wise, one would think he's a bit past his prime, but no way. He keeps proving that he chose the action-hero path at the very first moment. The film is suspenseful, with quite interesting twists, definitely above average, but not action-packed elite. (10/06/2014)

Neeson walking for some money. First I have to say that Liam Neeson is one of my favourites, but this film is definitely his weakest. There is literally nothing interesting and certainly nothing that I haven't seen in any other film that happens here. It's cliched and boring at the same time. There is very little action and it is so uninterestingly shot that you hardly even notice it. Fans of slow, boring and uninteresting films built solely on story, which I also found unexceptional here, might be happier. I haven't had as much trouble watching a film to the end as I did here in a long time. (10/15/2014)

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a noir film for people who don't know all that much about noir films and badly want for them to be like this. I don't hold any major grudge against it, and after the prologue (a smoke-filled morning bar, haggard bartender in the background, the shot through the coat, a scruffy Neeson and his drunkard’s dance on the stairs) I even found myself thinking I might love the film, but then the individual flaws began to line up behind each other at an increasingly less tolerable frequency. There are an awful lot of unnecessary characters who are given way too much space, a lot of the actors are obviously quite badly miscast (Dan Stevens, Sebastian Roché), and there are some merciless screenwriting perversions in an attempt to justify their existence in the film ("Dani here has a sniper rifle, but he's short-sighted, so give it to the junkie here who goes to AA meetings with Neeson and has been weaving her way into the frame so we can get some closure"). Besides, the early unmasking of the central killer duo made it impossible for me to stop thinking about Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which worked incredibly better with this motif. (02/17/2015)

A perfect, old school detective movie with a precise Neeson, perverted kidnappers and a cold, sodden atmosphere. These non-digital guy’s movies are few and far between and I’m glad that Scott Frank was able to resurrect this genre even in today’s world. A gloomy mood at the end of the millennium, full of junkies and cut-up whores, an ingenious story from the pen of Lawrence Block, all spiced with the crackly, hoarse, Irish telephone voice of a former drunk? I want a sequel! (10/31/2014)

Do not expect an action flick just because it’s Liam Neeson. The only action scene takes place in the first minutes. This film is closer in spirit to Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, but it’s afraid to become too dark and heavy. For incomprehensible reasons, it lightens up and mocks the aura around the main bad guys, who should chill you to the bone. Philosophizing over guilt and redemption does not work very well either – in one of the final scenes it sticks out like a sore thumb. Neeson is OK, but Ólafsson is the best, albeit in a smaller role (he was also the best in Walter Mitty). [Cinemark 18, Howard Hughes Promenade, LA] (09/20/2014)