Review: ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’

Who ordered the grim detective noir story featuring rape, torture, mutilation, extreme blood loss, and Liam Neeson saying “Let’s get our eat ons together?” Because your order of “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is up and ready, hot and steamy and messy and in your face and not all that pleasant.

Based on a 90’s novel of some sort, part of a series of novels featuring the same character, “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is about some guy named Scudder (Neeson), an ex-NYC cop with a guilty conscious and 8 years of sobriety under his belt who works as an unlicensed private investigator. A drug trafficker hires Scudder to find out who kidnapped and killed his wife and before he knows it, Scudder finds himself sucked into a crazy plot involving other women brutally murdered in the past and possible future murders n the verge of happening unless he can do something about it.

Being a movie involving some heavy, adult-minded themes and situations, it is kind of weird that the story includes a precocious homeless kid named TJ (Brian ‘Astro’ Bradley, the same kid from “Earth to Echo“) who teases Scudder about his age and how he doesn’t bother to teach himself how to use the internet or have a cell phone and stuff like that and oh yeah did I mention that this story almost arbitrarily takes placed in the winter leading up to the year 2000, so everything everywhere is like “Beware of the dreaded Y2K!” like on taxis and billboards and newspapers and stuff. So you got the kid talking all street to the old man, with the old man repeating a couple of the phrases back, and boom, you have the sequel to “Cop & A Half” that no one asked for, and with an inexplicable end of the millennium backdrop added for good measure.

Of course Liam Neeson is suitable for such a role, as it fits his recent M.O. for such movies – he plays a guy with a lot of guilt, with an alcohol addiction he either has in control or is out of control, either way it is there, and he has some sort of violent past stemming from training either via military or the police, and he is arguably not the best guy but still means well and has some sort of code that he lives by. That’s a modern Liam Neeson role through and through, so perfect casting. He lumbers through this movie with appropriate menace and gravitas, giving off the air of a man who could get things done, dirty, nasty, unpleasant things that others would want nothing to do with.

And the bad guys are suitably bad, to say the least. They are portrayed as monsters, just the most depraved, horrible type of people, and danger lurks right around the corner whenever they are involved. The set up is good and the movie is creepy throughout, and it kind of has an old school throwback feel in the slow build and the earnest portrayal of good versus evil, even when it includes a world filled with junkies and criminals. The initial scenes featuring Scudder hanging out with TJ are kind of cringe inducing because they come across pretty hamfisted and weirdly unnecessary. Who is this character supposed to appeal to? Are we trying to bring in a younger audience to our Liam Neeson mystery film noir?

This is a pulp kind of movie, a story told for the sake of telling the story, enjoy the mystery and the ride because that’s all there is here. Don’t expect any big emotional revelations or changes or anything significant, it’s kind of like an R-rated version of a television cop drama. After the credits role, I’d expect another Scudder movie to start right up where he solves another case, and then another and then another, a whole series of these movies with Liam Neeson being a bad ass unofficial PI. Actually that would be pretty cool. Who says these things have to have huge significance regarding anything at all? It’s just a story about some bad guys getting busted by our hero. Good enough for me.