narayansuma
Movie Review: A Walk Among the TombstonesA Walk Among the Tombstones is a film released on September 19, 2014, written and directed by Scott Frank, based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Lawrence Block. It stars Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Brian Bradley, and Boyd Holbrook.
The movie takes off with the protagonist, Detective Matthew "Matt" Scudder in a car, with a partner, who expresses his dissatisfaction with Matthew as a reliable back-up. Later, the detective goes into a bar; while he is there, there, two armed men come in and kill the bartender. Pursuing them, the detective kills all three people, including their getaway driver. Why, as a result of this shootout, Matthew retires from active service is what we come to know later in the movie. Much, much later.
Matthew becomes an active member of an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
Eight years later, a drug addict approaches Matthew and asks him to help his brother, a drug trafiicker whose wife has been kidnapped. Though the husband had rustled up and delivered the ransom money, it was the wife's tortured, brutalised, dis membered body which had been delivered to the husband. Trying to discover a lead or clue, Matthew frequents the library to discover similar crimes. He befriends a savvy, brutally frank, homeless teenager, TJ, in the library. Matthew speaks to people and comes across a groundsman in the graveyard, among the tombstones, close to where another dismembered body, packed in separate plastic bags was found floating in the pond.
Alone and without help, Matthew shoulders on, digging, digging, digging. And the killers are at large, hunting for their next prey. The scene cuts to the house of the killers from time to time, panning to their terrifying instruments of torture, with sharp, barbaric knives and gouges to cut up bits of living flesh while the victim screamed in agony. Another 14-year old girl is kidnapped; she is the daughter of another trafficker, and suddenly, Mattthew is in the centre of the action...
No, I am not going to be a spoiler here, or reveal the twists and turns of the plot. There are so many unexpected events happening that it is difficult to predict what will happen next.
Watch the movie for Liam Neeson's understated histrionics: how he makes do with one raised eyebrow to convey an entire page of script. He is shown to be human and vulnerable, morose and non-committal: TJ, the homeless teenager is a wonderful foil to his character. Bright, cynical, worldly wise, the would-be detective sails through the movie, putting down his angst and his talent down on pieces of paper, in the form of animation figures.
The climax, where there is a faceoff between the suave, slick killers and the bumbling team consisting of the father of the kidnapped girl, the husband of the murdered woman, the drug addict and Liam Neeson, among the tombstones in the same graveyard, is masterly. The voice over is of a woman reciting the 12 steps of recovery of a confirmed alcoholic:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
As these steps are recited in the voice-over, there is a parallel piece of action happening: and I found this analogy particularly moving. The haunting tracks of 'Black Hole Sun' featuring Nouela, that accompanies the rolling credits at the end, sounded like an extension of the neo noir genre that the movie is slotted into.
The movie concludes with a resolution, a firm friendship and trust between two strangers: TJ and Matthew, and a vindication of the resilience of the human spirit despite all odds.
Go, watch A Walk Among the Tombstones.
sddavis63
"A Walk Among The Tombstones" Is The Perfect Vehicle For Liam Neeson. He plays Matt Scudder - an ex-cop haunted by a troubled and alcoholic past who makes ends meet by working as an unlicensed private detective. He gets hired by a wealthy drug dealer to find the scum who kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered his wife, and as he investigates he discovers that she isn't the only one who's fallen victim to the killers - they've been targeting the wives, girlfriends and daughters of wealthy drug dealers - and in the end the movie focuses on the desperate search for a 14-year old girl who's been taken by them.This movie is dark and suspenseful, and Scudder is a dark, troubled and gritty character. From the very beginning the viewer is drawn in because after only a few minutes we become aware of what's happening to these young women with creepy shots of one of the terrified victims being bound and touched by her captors. It's enough to make you feel sympathy for the victims. You want these guys to be caught. You want justice and/or revenge for what they've done. The movie plays on that. It avoids the temptation to become overly graphic with what's happened to the victims. Just a few shots every now and then make things clear. There's a tense and sombre feel to this from the very beginning and that mood never really goes away.Neeson was superb. This character fit him to a "t." I was basically unfamiliar with the rest of the cast. They all did well enough. But they're not what I would consider big name actors. This was Neeson's movie. He would be the draw - his presence in the cast was why I chose to watch this - and he does not disappoint.There were a couple of things here that didn't work especially well for me. I wasn't entirely clear on how Scudder made the connection between the various killings as quickly as he did, and the character of T.J. - a homeless boy who befriends Scudder and becomes his sort-of partner - seemed extraneous to me. The movie could have worked perfectly well without him and I never really understood the point of his presence. But those are relatively minor quibbles. This is a very good movie with a story and performance from Neeson that are first-rate. (8/10)
Robert J. Maxwell
Liam Neeson is finally out of his "Taken" franchise and gets a chance to perform as a human being rather than just act. He's an unlicensed private detective who resigned from the NYPD after accidentally shooting and killing a little girl after drinking. He's since joined AA.He's hired by a civilized-sounding drug dealer whose wife was kidnapped. The dealer wants to know who they are, since he's paid the ransom and the kidnappers tortured and killed her anyway, cutting her up into little pieces and distributing them in trash bags here and there. Neeson digs into the case a little and finds that two or three men have been doing the same thing for some time -- not just serial killers, but genuine menaces to humanity.Neesom acquires a kind of acolyte, a black kid who has sickle cell anemia (don't worry; no bathos) and loves private eyes like Sam Spade. Neesom himself plays the role as subdued. Not subdued because he's not bothering to animate the character, but subdued in the sense that he seems like a perfectly normal, if wary, kind of guy. He's not the whirling dervish of the "Taken" movies at all. He can be coshed and beaten painfully and suffer from the beating for hours afterward. (Again, no bathos; this is part of his life.) No love interest, no spectacular shoot outs, nobody's head is wrenched off, no wisecracks. It's a tense and suspenseful movie about a good man trying to do something worthwhile and trying to cope with his weaknesses.Neesom can be a fine actor given the right role. He has an endearingly lumpy face and his nose begins in the middle of his forehead. It's well worth catching.
