Review: ‘Run All Night’

Are you ready for the conclusion to the exciting Liam Neeson – Jaume Collet-Serra trilogy of action movies? Bet you didn’t even realize such a thing EXISTED, yet here we are, three deep into the sneakiest artistic collaboration since the paranoia duology of 2013 by Jake Gyllenhaal and Denis Villeneuve (okay, that one’s for the film geeks). First Liam and Jaume tackled a case of mistaken identity, then they took on airplane murder, and now finally they bring it home with the story of a hitman turned drunkard trying to keep his adult son from being murdered by the mob. You know…THAT old tale.

In “Run All Night,” Jimmy (Liam Neeson) spends most of his time drunk, a washed up hitman for the mob who can’t battle his demons anymore, he’s thrown in the towel, he is a pathetic wreck of a man who can only quietly take it when everyone from his boss’s son to the local police take the time out of their busy days to verbally run him down. The only friend he has in the world is his buddy Sean (Ed Harris) and the problem with this friendship is that Sean is the guy in charge of this particular mob and he is the reason Jimmy went out and did so much killing, so really Sean is the guy who helped put Jimmy in this bad spot. He must feel guilty about it, which is why when Jimmy agrees to play Santa at the family Christmas party but then got too drunk and acted a fool in front of everyone, instead of getting mad at him Sean had Jimmy cleaned up and gave him a bed and a sandwich and was super nice to him. They even bothered to reminisce about the time they were teenagers and had sex with their girlfriends while in neighboring beds, a little bit of the old nostalgia to make everything feel a little better.

Which is why it is kind of sad when Jimmy has to kill Sean’s son in order to save his own son Michael (Joel Kinnaman), and the rest of the movie is like a reverse “Out For Justice,” as Jimmy spends the rest of that night trying to keep Michael alive while Sean’s goons go out there looking for them. It is a decent set up for a story, but unfortunately much of the movie is actually kind of dull. Most of the action is fairly forgettable. Actually, there is one car chase that is interesting mostly because it involves a cop car as the vehicle being chased, as opposed to the one doing the chasing, and this is an interesting inversion of this very standard action movie trope, something that I don’t think I’ve seen before in a movie, so there’s that. But otherwise, it is all pretty basic stuff, you know a couple of shoot outs here, a rote foot chase there, some Liam Neeson hand to hand fighting, all the normal stuff you’d expect in a movie like this. The most surprising bit of action may have been Common popping up as a contract killer, but even by the time the movie is over he’s not much more than a standard movie contract killer – uber professional but a little psychotic. You know, the same old same old.

Really the only interesting parts of this movie are the couple of scenes of Jimmy and Sean, whether they are talking about the old days or discussing the situation they find themselves in during a “Heat” like sit down pow-wow scene, the only thing that seemed to have any life to it was the decades long friendship between these characters. But then again, outside of Sean being like “We were best friends and now I have to kill you because you killed my son,” it is not like their friendship actually gets that developed. Much of their relationship is unspoken at this point, which makes sense for people who have been friends for so long, but for a movie, it leaves us with little details about who they were and how they got to these points in their lives.

Instead the relationship that gets a little more development is the father – son relationship between Jimmy and Michael, and even then it only gets developed from “they don’t speak to each other” to “now they are speaking to each other.” We learn about how shitty of a dad Jimmy was and how Michael cut him out of his life a few years back, and we get it, Michael is angry at him, he’s always angry at him, but that’s just it, he is ALWAYS angry, until the end when he softens just a little, but is still wary of the guy. It is obvious Jimmy feels guilty for being a lousy dad and that he wants Michael to be different from him, but its not like there was ever any chance of Michael being different, he’s a good guy, he mentors “inner city” (read: black) youths at a boxing gym and he has a wife and two kids with a third on the way, and he’s a hard working guy trying to provide for his family, he’s a good dude, we know this. So Jimmy is kind of worrying for nothing on that front.

Anyway, this whole movie is just unfortunately kind of boring because there are no big revelations, the drama doesn’t teach any of the characters anything new about themselves or each other, it all just sort of exists as a few genre tropes stitched together to make one movie. This is kind of middle of the road Neeson, which isn’t really a bad thing, he’s just been in better movies. He’s been in worse ones, as well, so I guess that’s something.