A Walk Among The Tombstones - Blu-ray Review

 'takes Liam Neeson away from just running, shooting and punching and towards more of a traditional Mystery Thriller'

As the 'Neesploitation' sub-genre continues, apparently unabated, Scott Frank's A Walk Among The Tombstones takes Liam Neeson away from just running, shooting and punching and towards more of a traditional Mystery Thriller, a tome of films specifically referred to throughout this narrative by sidekick TJ (Astro).

Neeson here plays Matt Scudder, a familiar version of his now standard lived-in character, with a chequered history and an unspectacular future. Accepting a job of dubious merits - finding the people who murdered drug dealer Kenny Kristo's (Dan Stevens) wife - Scudder confronts a burgeoning web of dodgy folk, whilst, shock, battling his own demons, which appear to have come directly from Joe Carnahan's still-influential Narc.

Template duly dusted off and pulled out from storage, A Walk Among The Tombstones does nothing new with it, nor enough to ruin it. This is a perfectly acceptable mainstream Thriller, with a pair of villains eventually revealed to be rather nasty and a satisfying web of anti-heroes headed by Stevens and Neeson. The plot rarely surprises and perhaps suffers from a lack of grandstanding moments; there is a face-off in a graveyard later on, but as set pieces go it's pretty low key and in-keeping with the fact that the film wants to focus on mystery, rather than action.

After the recent cinema release of Run All Night, it looks as though Neeson is heading for a break from this sort of thing for a while. Next up for him is a role in Ted 2, a J.A. Bayona film called A Monster Calls and Martin Scorsese's Silence. When you look back at some of the 'successes' of this little run (this film, Non-Stop and Unknown) I, for one, will miss the reliability of a Neeson-fronted Thriller, especially in a world where that genre seems to be producing fewer and fewer reliable offerings every year. Luckily, the impossibly named Narco Sub is on the horizon, due for more shooting and punching in a couple of year's time.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.