I never would have guessed that Liam Neeson could make a mullet work like that, but he rocks it hard in the flashback sequence. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.
A Walk Among the Tombstones, based on one of Lawrence Block’s novels about private detective Matthew Scudder, looks like it would have been a fantastic book.
The film stars Liam Neeson as the title character. An alcoholic eight years sober, Scudder works as an unlicensed private detective after accidentally killing a 7-year-old in an off-duty shootout while working as a cop. He takes the case of Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens), a drug dealer whose wife has been kidnapped and gruesomely murdered. Scudder uncovers a pair of vicious serial killers who the cops won’t touch. Along the way, he befriends TJ (Brian Bradley), a homeless black kid with sickle-cell anemia, and attends a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
The saying goes that the book is always better than the movie, but A Walk Among the Tombstones goes beyond that. The story was made for novelization. There are a ton of characters with important roles. There are high-arcing periodic and existential themes, the kind that you hear about in books but not in movies often because they’re relatively easy to capture with words but extremely difficult to shoot, so difficult that filmmakers often have to sacrifice some form of marketability to really do it right. There’s a negotiation later in the film in which Scudder establishes that a kidnapped girl is still alive by having the kidnapper relay information that she would have that is clever but not dramatic — it’s exactly the kind of thing that would play well in a book, but isn’t at all cinematic.
There’s something magical about summer. Backyard grills, relaxing with friends, studios pushing the boundaries of what’s even theoretically profitable by throwing as much money as they can at the craziest kook they can find who knows how to operate a camera, thinking that they’ll make it all back.
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