The new Naked Gun movie works particularly well because its star Liam Neeson, like Leslie Nielsen in the original, plays the lead in a spoofy comedy after accumulating a robust filmography’s worth of recognition as a much less zany performer. Though Neeson’s characters and performances have always been on the serious side, his career got a makeover tailored to his particularly intense set of skills in 2009 when Taken became a surprise smash. Many more thrillers in a similar vein followed, including two more Taken movies with diminishing returns — as memorable as Taken remains, the premise of an ex-CIA operative relentlessly pursuing the kidnappers of his daughter doesn’t lend itself particularly well to an ongoing franchise. But a few months before Taken 3 capped off the improbable adventures of Bryan Mills, Neeson starred in a movie that was ready-made to become a sturdier signature franchise for his late-career reinvention. Unfortunately, A Walk Among the Tombstones fell through the cracks.
Neeson plays Matt Scudder, the recovering alcoholic and ex-cop who first appeared in a series of detective novels by Lawrence Block (and later on screen in a loose adaptation of Eight Million Ways to Die, where Jeff Bridges portrayed him). Director Scott Frank’s film A Walk Among the Tombstones draws from a later book in the series as well as Scudder’s tragedy-by-way-of-airport-novel backstory: As a younger addict, he was drinking in a cop-friendly bar when it was robbed by a group of gun-toting criminals. Pursuing them after they shot the bartender, Scudder took them down, but a bullet caught a “bad bounce,” as he puts it, and killed an innocent bystander. Because the bad guys fired first, he wasn’t reprimanded. He quit the force anyway, and now works as an unlicensed private investigator.
This former cop with institution-approved skills, implementing them with his personal moral code, isn’t too far removed from former CIA operative Bryan Mills. But A Walk Among the Tombstones isn’t an action movie, and even as a detective yarn, it’s uncommonly mournful and chilly. Scudder is recruited by his Alcoholics Anonymous friend Peter (Boyd Holbrook) to help Peter’s wealthy drug-dealer brother Kenny (Dan Stevens) track down the men who murdered his wife. Rather than a vengeful rampage, Neeson essentially goes on a pre-revenge fact-finding mission. Eventually, the movie does incorporate some actual peril, and the serial killers who provide it are truly creepy. But Frank does his best work by providing what the Taken movies utterly lack: a sense of atmosphere that matches Neeson’s wintry gravitas. The man was simply born to walk around in a scarf, ask questions while suppressing his Irish brogue, and occasionally issue a no-nonsense threat. He does deliver one classic through-a-window punch, made even better by his realization that he has to coax the guy into it by knocking on a door. (The victim calls it a sucker punch, and he’s not wrong.)
Befitting its older-guy vibes, A Walk Among the Tombstones is also a period piece. It’s set in 1999 New York City, with occasional mentions of Y2K and an actual research trip to the public library where Scudder receives help from homeless teenager T.J. (Brian “Astro” Bradley) with internet searching. (He mistakes a website for a program.) The time period takes advantage of some pre-gentrification Brooklyn atmosphere, and also incorporates location shooting in the historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Scott shoots much of the movie in deep, rich shadows that evoke noir, though the eclectic characters Scudder meets all seem sadder and more downcast than your typical noir ensemble. The serial killer material is so depressingly gruesome that it threatens to throw the whole thing off.
A noirish mood better fits the intense guilt Neeson brings to so many of his characters, and which is mostly absent from the questionable heroism of the Taken films. A Walk Among the Tombstones is closer to the thrillers he’s made with Jaume Collet-Serra, where he’s frequently guilt-ridden and/or alcoholic, though their neo-Hitchcockian plots tend to make them more fun. Frank, who also worked as a screenwriter on Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, James Mangold’s Wolverine movies, and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, and created the recent series Monsieur Spade and Dept. Q, clearly relishes the bones of noir, but seems incapable of making a mere genre workout. A Walk Among the Tombstones feels specifically like a recovery movie: Scudder isn’t wrestling with whether to have a drink, at least not visibly. He’s figuring out how to shape his life in a world without alcohol or police work.
In a somber sort of way, that struggle would have made Scudder a promising ongoing character for Neeson, just as Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress presented Denzel Washington with a perfect long-term role in detective Easy Rawlins, only to be thwarted by low box office. A Walk Among the Tombstones isn’t quite on that Devil in a Blue Dress classic-noir level. But it’s within spitting distance of the Christopher McQuarrie/Tom Cruise version of Jack Reacher, with a similar level of muscular, unfussy craft behind the camera and the masculine sparseness of the hero’s lifestyle in front of it. Cruise didn’t really need Reacher as a signature character, so it wasn’t a big deal when that movie series ended after two installments. But Neeson’s version of Scudder could have poked around unsolved New York mysteries for years to come. If it doesn’t seem like a particularly fun headspace, he could still take his Frank Drebin break.
A Walk Among the Tombstones is streaming on Paramount Plus.