A Walk Among the Tombstones

In a 12 hour span I managed to convince a girl not to sleep with me by offending her with my awful jokes, promised to impregnate another if the DJ played Erotic City, and had a half a beer spewed in my face as if I had just won the pennant! I was going to replace 'just won the pennant' with an awful joke about Jennifer Lawrence and the private photos of hers that were leaked online but I am still barely human, so I held back. Anyway the point is, this is what happens when movie critics aren't confined to the dark rooms they normally spend the majority of their time in; the sun does weird things to our bodies and we don't know how to interact with people anymore!

I'm not saying that we will turn into the monsters that wreak havoc in A Walk Among the Tombstones but I'd expect a Rain Man freak out at some point if were are not properly monitored. Speaking of Tombstones and monsters, didn't the previews for this movie look like a refreshing break from the last 20 movies Liam Neeson has made? Sure he plays another cop who looks way too serious all of the time but this movie seemed a bit darker than some of his previous work. Yes I realize that in Taken his daughter was being sold as a sex slave but this movie felt as though they were going to take it to another level a la Se7en.

In Tombstones, Neeson is an unlicensed private detective who is hired by a drug trafficker to find the people who kidnapped and killed his wife. Even though he paid the ransom they asked for, they still brutally murdered her. As Neeson starts asking around and digging deeper into the case, he finds that this was not an isolated incident and that these killers have done this before and more than likely will continue doing so until stopped. Neeson is introduced to a seedy underworld as their victims all seem to have one thing in common and its up to him to track them down before they take out their next target.

The premise had potential but Scott Frank (writer/director) fell into the land of cliche's and totally whiffed on the execution. For some reason Neeson teams up with a smart and quick witted homeless black kid to help him with the case, which is ridiculous on so many levels. I will say that the kid did provide a few funny moments in the movie but it felt too much like a weaker version of  Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis in Die Hard 3. Also the reason why Neeson left the police force has been done to death at this point; I seriously got this movie confused with The November Man for a minute or two while watching it. And Frank's attempt to pay homage to or directly steal from The Godfather at the end with his shoot out scene fell completely flat.

The fact that you know who the killers are and what they look like early on takes away from the suspense. And the fact they just look like a couple of normal scrubs who look bored because it's the NFL's off-season didn't aid in their creepiness. Even Neeson was openly mailing it in in a few scenes and if he doesn't care then neither should you.

I rate this movie as WEAK and I'd suggest waiting for HBO to run it before the new season of Girls.