A Walk Among the Tombstones

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Revelers of the hardboiled detective genre, delight. Crime novelist Lawrence Block could only hope what screenwriter-director Scott Frank and actor Liam Neeson did with his work they have made a good one indeed for cinema history. “A Walk Among The Tombstones” not only captures ex-cop (now very unlicensed private dick) Matthew Scudder at his most soulful (“I do favors for people, and they give me gifts,” he says), but this film alone resurrects a kind of crime movie that many have missed.

That is, a crime drama that isn’t all bang-bang and chop-chop. Not that such movies don’t offer their pleasures. Liam Neeson himself has been great in many of them. But audiences who love the likes of “Jackie Brown” and “Out of Sight,” not to mention older, more hardy specimens like “The Maltese Falcon,” “Murder, My Sweet,” etc., have been starving lately. And so “A Walk Among The Tombstones” gives us plenty to chew on.

The story begins in 1991, which finds Scudder still on the force having a very bad day in a scene of shocking violence it’s not the first such scene we’ve seen then jumps ahead to 1999 and drops us down into a soberly dour New York City gripped by Y2K panic where Scudder gets reluctantly drawn into a strange kidnap and murder case being handled by two junkie traffickers whose wives have already met gruesome fates.

Once again following the unseen killers’ trail through every borough while gently nudging around the police who are now asking him for help rather than his flashing badge at them as he used to do (he lost it during an incident after getting drunk on duty), director Frank keeps things simmering steadily even as he’s carefully building characters; so when they blow, Frank doesn’t f*** around.

The story centers on a pair of sickos who have been kidnapping and ransoming the wives of drug dealers and traffickers in the city; because their prey are related to criminals, bringing the police in is a dicey option for the victims (they’re not exactly inclined to help out somebody who put their husband/brother/father away), and because they’re sickos, once they get paid they don’t return the wife.

It’s an even more twisted operation than I’m letting on here, and Frank shows us just enough of it to make our stomachs turn along with Scudder’s growing anger at what he’s seeing or what he should be feeling if not for all that stoicism keeping his personal demons at bay. When they up the ante and make their latest victim a 13-year old daughter of a powerful drug kingpin whose organization includes crooked cops well, let’s just say you might leave some teeth marks on your armrest.

This is not the first time Scudder has been on screen: that was in Oliver Stone’s sadly misguided 1986 collaboration with Hal Ashby, “Eight Million Ways to Die.” “Tombstones” reboots the character and gets him right. Not only physically. Neeson conveys Scudder’s toughness, intelligence, world weariness, but also his humanity and humor.

While researching the case, Scudder meets an African-American homeless teenager named T.J. (Brian “Astro” Bradley, nicely), with whom he forms an unlikely but eventually touching friendship; the film shows their bond in a way that is completely unpatronizing and believable. Frank takes real chances with the climactic showdown scene of his film; rather than stage a straight action set piece, he staggers events and intercuts them with a scene that defines Scudder’s growth as a person.

The movie wonders how Scudder who says that alcoholics are only two drinks away from a bender will hold up under exposure to one of evil’s more monumental examples. Pictures like “Taken,” fun as they may be, don’t ask us to worry about whether or not their protagonists’ souls are at stake. “A Walk Among The Tombstones” does, and so in addition to being a dynamite thriller, it gives you something kind of substantial for your extra.

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