Run All Night

I am sure that there will come a time when we will all grow tired of seeing Liam Neeson play the old man badass; one who has the ability to beat up bad guys that are half his age and have better weapons than him. But that day isn’t today! Only Neeson can be in a movie where in a car chase scene, he is the one chasing cops and not vice versa; only he can get away with openly gunning down cops in the streets of New York and no one says anything. My cousin put it perfectly, the only way he can top himself now is if they go full old man badass mode and cast him versus Bruce Willis. Why has this not happened already? And why doesn’t Neeson have a catch phrase like “Yippee kaya mother$%^!” Someone needs to call 2Chainz immediately and get him on this, if anyone can find something unintentionally fresh to say with the word mutherf&^% in it, it’s him!

Well in his latest movie where he’s an old man with a special set of skills, Neeson plays a former mobster hit man Jimmy Conlon whose past has finally caught up with. Every murder he’s ever committed and every poor choice he’s made in life has taken its toll on him and has turned him into a drunk who people regularly ridicule and look upon in disgust, including his estranged son Mike who hates him for abandoning him and his mother.

His boss and childhood friend Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) keeps him around because of their tight bond and because he feels as though he needs to look after him. But one day Shawn’s hothead son Danny gets mixed up with some shady Albanians and finds himself in trouble. And after a bad exchange takes place, Mike now finds himself as a target of Danny’s because he witnessed something he wasn’t supposed to.

Neeson shows up and kills Danny in order to protect his son and now finds himself as the target of his lifelong friend Shawn.

What’s great is that it doesn’t just stop there, because there are dirty cops on Shawn’s payroll, they also get involved with the feud along with another hit man, Common. Yes, that’s Common the rapper. So in a span of 16 hours, Neeson has to find a way to mend the relationship with his son while also protecting him and his family, and deciding whether or not this is the end of his loyalty to his lifelong friend Shawn.

There’s tons of gun play, car chases (as mentioned earlier), random explosions, night vision, and trash talking, so there’s really nothing more you can ask for. I think Neeson realizes that he doesn’t have a catch phrase so he randomly drops nuggets of awesomeness just before he kills someone. And there is a great shoot out scene in one of the nicest looking projects you will ever see in New York, it looks like some posh high rise out of Berlin. And my cousin also pointed out that this project building had the most snitches she’d ever seen in her life, since when did Black people start trusting the police?

This movie works because Neeson is so comfortable playing this role that it’s almost like he was born for it, and Ed Harris is his usual solid self. Plus it’s hard to mess up a movie where gangsters are trying to take out a hit man who also has cops and other random hit men chasing him. It simply means more action and less lame talking.

All I have to say is that Neeson does it again and that you should definitely go check it out. Run All Night gets a rating of FRESH!