A Walk Through The Tombstones (2014) a (mildly) belated review

Some films really make you scratch your head in wonder, but not for good reasons.

Last year’s Liam Neeson non-Taken action/suspense film A Walk Through The Tombstones is one of those type of films.

It is well acted, well filmed, reasonably well edited, and was based on a popular novel by well respected crime novelist Lawrence Block.  The film also starts reasonably well and, as a viewer, I was engaged.  Unfortunately, the film then loses steam until by the time we’re halfway through it becomes inert and unengaging.

As mentioned, I couldn’t help but wonder why, given all the positives mentioned above, this movie proved to be so mediocre to me.

Before I get to that, a quick plot rundown: The film starts in New York City in 1991.  We meet NYPD detective Matt Scudder (Liam Neeson)  He’s a hard drinking, hard charging detective and, in those opening scenes, he stops by a local bar to take down some shots of whiskey when a trio of violent criminals show up.  A gunfight erupts and Scudder gets his men in your typical Dirty Harry bad-ass manner.  We then abruptly fast forward to 1999.

Scudder is a noticeably changed man, and the audience, at least those paying attention, should suspect we weren’t told the entire story of what happened in 1991 (we will be, in time.  The trailer below almost gives it all away).  Scudder has quit the police force and is now in AA.  He is also a private eye.  A fellow AA member asks him to see his brother about a job.  Turns out the brother’s wife was abducted and, after he paid the ransom for her, she was gruesomely killed and dismembered.  While on this initial visit with the brother, Scudder figures out the man is a drug dealer (he views himself as a “trafficker”) and, because on this, refuses to take the job.

He has a change of heart a little later on when the clearly desperate man shows up unannounced at his apartment doorstep and, through a taped recording the killers left of his wife’s final moments, shows just how twisted these men are.  Scudder, while clearly uncomfortable with the idea of working for a drug dealer, nonetheless realizes the kidnappers who killed this man’s wife are evil and need to be stopped.

Given the gruesome nature of the killers’ crimes, this film could easily have followed along the lines of a Se7en.  But, in perhaps the first and biggest error in judgment in the making of this film, the people behind the cameras decided to tone down the graphic nature of the story as much as possible and offer hints of violence rather than bludgeoning us with the viscera.

Mind you, I’m not a “blood and guts” guy.  Subtlety works fine -more than fine!- for me and has worked in many a movie,  However, in this case I believe the subtlety worked against the film’s overall impact.  Worse, too much screen time is devoted to ancillary characters that aren’t anywhere near as interesting as Scudder and the mystery he’s facing, including a street urchin our protagonist takes in (to be fair, he does figure into the film’s climax).

In the end we’re never really into the bad guy’s heads as much as we should be.  We know they’re bad, bad, bad, but we know little else about them.  The movie’s climax, at a cemetery (natch) and the villain’s home, winds up being nowhere near as exciting/suspenseful as it should have been.

As I’ve already said, the end results left me scratching my head.  A Walk Among the Tombstones, at least from the outside looking in, had all the ingredients to make it a terrific crime/suspense/horror film.  The end result, unfortunately, is something of a misfire.  A Walk Among the Tombstones is a perfectly average crime film that, while not a total disaster, is hardly a wild success.

Too bad.

Below is the trailer for A Walk Among the Tombstones.  Not only is the trailer rather spoilery, it is also far more effective than the movie itself.  Another case where the trailer is better than the movie it is trying to sell!