A Walk Among the Tombstones

"A Walk Among the Tombstones," the latest Liam Neeson vehicle, will leave those moviegoers who are more or less expecting "Taken 3" a little disappointed. Instead of a bone-cracking revenge flick, director Scott Frank delivers a slow and steady crime mystery that provides a more refreshing and thoughtful role for Neeson than is typical of his recent fare.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that Liam Neeson was once an award-winning dramatic leading actor and even Oscar nominee on the strength of his performance in "Schindler's List" back in 1993. Ever since "Taken" became a surprise hit in 2008/2009, Neeson has seemed content to fashion a career as an action star and occasionally chew the scenery with small roles in big-budget noise like "Clash of the Titans" and "Battleship."

In "A Walk Among the Tombstones," Neeson stars as Matt Scudder, a well-worn ex-cop and private investigator hired to find the perpetrators of the grisly murder of a drug dealer's wife. The clues lead to a pair of killers who use blackmail as a sadistic pretense to torture and murder women associated with the drug trade. "A Walk Among the Tombstones" is set in the months prior to Y2K, and its lead is an analog man in a digital age, preferring pay phones to cell phones and microfiche instead of the Internet. He's as tough as they come but still spends more time pounding pavement than pounding bad guys. Neeson plays the character with a sort of unadorned practicality and without a hint of the romance that the "hard-boiled gumshoe" role usually embodies.

Behaving like an action hero cliché is why Scudder is now an ex-cop, and his attempts to adhere to the principles of his 12-step recovery program are a theme throughout the film. The type of violence that is so often the ultimate solution in the "Taken" films is the ultimate failure in "A Walk Among the Tombstones." Scudder may sometimes stray from that path, but the realism with which Neeson portrays those struggles elevates the film above the typical crime thriller.

The plot of the film is not extraordinary, and in fact it reminds of many of the retread serial killer detective movies so popular in the late 90s and early 2000s, such as "Kiss the Girls" or "Along Came a Spider." While the story is pretty much by the numbers, "A Walk Among the Tombstones" is well directed and well acted, and seeing Liam Neeson finally getting to complement his tough-guy action hero persona with a character-driven story makes for an entertaining film.

3.5 Yaps

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HDQ_PEVgwI?rel=0&w=514&h=289]