Coming Soon. Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. Leave it to the real cops, he told the guy. Scudder isnt a reckless vigilante eaten up with rage. He tells Scudder that he should be scared of the other two men because theyre not human. He feeds his pigeons, gives Scudder one name, "Ray," and then he jumps off the roof to his death. A Walk Among the Tombstones isn't a kill-'em-all Taken-style actioner. Liam Neeson then became the go-to leading man for action thrillers for a period, leading toThe A-Team, Run All Night and several others. Its not quite a guiding force, but it keeps him grounded, particularly in a vocation that exposes him to some abhorrent crimes and people, the kind that would make returning the bottle a very attractive proposition. 2023 Vox Media, LLC. You're almost there! Starring: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour. You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. And the film as a whole winds up as a tricky balance between the two modes, one that doesnt always work (read our review) but is nonetheless admirable, particularly in an era when thoughtfulness usually plays second fiddle to explosions. 5 5.Gay Villains of Walk Among the Tombstones Signal Return of 6 6.A Walk Among The Tombstones: Book Vs Movie Differences; 7 7.Movie Spoiler for the film - A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES; 8 8.A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) - Plot Synopsis - IMDb; 9 9.SPOILERS: The two bad guys - A Walk Among the Tombstones 10 10.Book To . We wont be able to verify your ticket today, but its great to know for the future. Scudder reminds Kenny that there is enough evidence to put Albert behind bars for the rest of his life. Liam Neeson had a bizarre rebirth as an action star thanks to 2008's Taken, where he played a retired special forces operative who cuts a bloody path through Paris to rescue his kidnapped daughter. My book's in good hands. He tells Scudder their address. Parker Posey stars in this update of Chekhov, swapping familiar New York intelligentsia types for the Russian bourgeoisie. Said by the character himself towards the end of Blocks novel, its a bit of wink (if not the greatest decision) that Frank essentially does that in the film, putting the teenager in the back of the bad guys van after the handoff for the girl and money in the graveyard. Matt Scudder: I do favors for people, and in return, they give me gifts. However he changes his mind and goes back, which is just as well, as Albert has escaped his bonds. Its that earnest effort to save, to beat time, to help the desperate and to make amends for past wrongs that turns a few steps in this long walk in the right direction. One of his stray bullets "took a bad hop" and hit a 7-year-old girl in the eye, instantly killing her. The first big-screen adaptation of these novels was 1986's 8 Million Ways To Die, which cast Jeff Bridges as Scudder. Now that's out of the way, a brief introduction. All rights reserved. And we hear quite a lot about the drug trade and the people who are either caught in it or are furthering it. He has the wisdom to know what cant be changed and what can. Matt Scudder (Liam Neeson), formerly part of the NYPD, now works as an unlicensed private detective. A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games; he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. But now movies are about spectacle. In 'The Grey', a movie completely steered away from the idea of crime, he was still a pretty knowledgeable badass who could kill if he needed. After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. The film is largely faithful to the core story of the novel, while cutting several subplots and supporting characters. murders Ray, he's captured by Matthew and tells him he was going to sit down to a meal before disposing of Ray's body. Matt Follows Loogan. I think you're talking about when Ray claimed he killed the wife because Kenny negotiated on the price. During a conversation with TJ, Scudder explains why he retired. Starring Liam Neeson. Read on to uncover the details. Scudder researches similar killings at a public library. I feel like Liam Neeson hasn't been given much to work with since the success of "Taken." Most dates on his world tour have been canceled. The girl taken hostage is alive, but not entirely unharmed. My main question is: How did T.J. get into the van with the fire fight going on? 5. However, they see his 14-year-old daughter, Lucia, and Ray decides to kidnap her. Jonas. We see their body parts, wrapped in plastic and paper, in the back of a car, in a dumpster, on the grounds of a graveyard and floating in a pond. Once we get to know him, we realize that Matt is indeed a good guy who regrets and constantly works to atone for his bad past. Neeson plays Matt Scudder, an ex-cop turned unlicensed private investigator who reluctantly agrees to help a heroin trafficker (Dan Stevens, TV's Downton Abbey) hunt down . That seemed like the most implausible part of the movie. The Story And Setting A Walk Among the Tombstones. He cries to Albert that he has never been wounded before. Set in 1999, the film follows a retired cop turned private investigator Matthew Scudder being dragged into a kidnapping/murder case. This password will be used to sign into all, Okay, TikTok, You Can Calm Down About Aubrey Plaza at the SAG Awards Now, Shakira Takes Some Pointers From Taylor Swift, The Surprisingly Contrarian Case Against Lying About Science, Ed Sheeran Completes His PEMDAS Era With New Album, ASTROs Rocky Leaves the Group After Ending Contract. [4], The film earned $428,000 from Thursday night from 1,918 theaters, and $4.7 million from 2,712 theaters on its opening day. (Hes equally effective in the coming The Equalizer.) How viewers can change the meaning of a great artists work. People who enjoy thrillers are so accustomed to the cat-and-mouse storytelling dynamic that they think the hero/villain dichotomy is unavoidable. He goes down the basement and sees Kenny's dead body on the stairs (implying that Albert killed Kenny). Meanwhile, a despondent Pete is unable to stay sober, and commits suicide. He's super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. In fact, at first it's hard to see where tombstones fit in at all. Truth be told, Matt didnt want anything to do with this mess. Could be wrong though. Kennys brother Peter is a drug addict who attends AA meetings with Matt. Shes dead. Based on Lawrence Block's bestselling series of mystery novels, A Walk among the Tombstones stars Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-NYPD cop who now works as an unlicensed private. Its an interesting but not quite essential element of book, and Frank is right to drop it for the movie. ), although it did have its druggy charms. Given the legal and cultural advances pertaining to gay rights and marriage equality, it was likely that some form of backlash would erupt. Hence why the former killed the latter, because he had gotten what he wanted and didn't like the dude. Get the freshest reviews, news, and more delivered right to your inbox! [13] On October 18, 2013, Block tweeted that he had seen the film and revealed producers were aiming for a September 2014 release. The one teen girl who survives has several of her fingers chopped off. Stevens evokes every shade of the self-made drug kingpins thoughts: His hands are tied, but he visibly hungers to wrap them around the killers necks. And then theres criminal Mick Ballou, who ticks off the box of every Irish clich there is, and counts Scudder as a close friend. Matt Scudder used to be a cop. [23] In Variety, Andrew Barker found it a well-made thriller "with a good deal of panache and style".[24]. Mick would be a pretty good bet on the basis for her role. And we see them use some of them. Anytime, as a captain, you step onto someone elses crew, its never an easy dance.. 2014 | Maturity Rating: R | 1h 54m | Mysteries. Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. Starring Liam Neeson. It contains a mix of suspense, thriller and neo-noir elements. What I cant accept is the loss of the finale that gives A Walk Among the Tombstones its grisly poetic symmetry and conclusively demonstrates the difference between Scudders passive acceptance of violence and the vigilante fury of the man hes working for. Liam Neeson brilliant as Scudder, Scott Frank script and direction tops. This was probably inevitable. But I could have lived with that. The only surprise is that this most primitive kind of homophobia now occurs in the context of a big budget movie geared to mainstream tastes--such as pressing the usual race/feminist buttons same as formulaic TV shows. Hes another of Gods Loneliest Men. Nothing more, nothing less. He interviews witnesses, finds evidence of other victims, and wanders a gray, malignant city in mourning over something he did years ago while drunk. Hes slower and heavier-spirited. During the fight in the basement, the table starts to break before they fully hit it, making it obvious that the table wasn't "real", also Scudder picks up the table leg and it is obviously cut straight across rather then jagged like a break would be. Which, of course, finally leads us right up to those tombstones. A Walk Among the Tombstones is a 2014 American neo-noir action thriller film[5][6][7][8] directed and written by Scott Frank, and based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Lawrence Block. And while TJ does tip off Scudder and co. to the location of the killers home, in the book this is accomplished much earlier and without the hokeyness of him jumping in the back of the van. The movie follows private investigator Matthew Scudder hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife. He also comes to care for a homeless kid named TJ, who he meets during his investigation. Theyd been watching the house. "A Walk among the Tombstones" is a gloomy crime film developed in slow pace, but with a complex story. There is also an underlying thread of race in the book, as Blocks dealers are Lebanese Kenan and Pete Khoury. For one thing, Scudder plays only a peripheral role an action-movie no-no. [9] In May 2012, Liam Neeson had reportedly signed on to play Matthew Scudder in the film, with Frank himself directing, and production slated to begin February 2013. In Blocks version, Ray (David Harbour) calmly garrottes his partner before Scudder and his pals get there. Chewing the fat with shop owners and others who might have seen more than they realize. Neesom's Scudder even refers to Ray and Albert as a "Bert and Ernie act." Her body was found chopped into neatly wrapped pieces in the back of an abandoned car. A Walk Among The Tombstones'movie finale sees Scudder and Kenny tracking down kidnapper Albert after the gunfight, with the latter having killed wounded partner Ray. Both of these things are true to the source material, but in the books by Lawrence Block, he has a much more interesting intersection of people in his life. Soon he finds that the killers have murdered other women connected to drug dealers and they get their files from the DEA. I was so uncertain of what his arc would be that I even wondered briefly if he was going to end up shooting Liam Neeson in the end of the movie, right when you think the action is over. Albert suddenly tries to strangle him from behind with a metal wire. The little girl who was accidentally killed in Scudder's shootout with the robbers at the bar. Neeson turns in a solid performance, backed by a good supporting cast that features Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as a sympathetic drug trafficker and a couple of really vicious bad guys. I thought it was a good flick. Nowadays, hes something of a private detective. Conclusion I think he does what he can with what he's got, but this is yet another two hours of Liam Neeson psyching out the baddies over the phone and then ultimately solving problems with his gun. And the challenge is to make those little moves feel big enough that they warrant a movie. Firstly, there is no shootout in the graveyard, a sequence which seems invented purely for the sake of putting action on the screen. A Walk Among the Tombstones isnt a kill-em-all Taken-style actioner. For our money, wed say for the full Scudder experience youll want the book, but as an abridged version, the film does an adequate if not wholly satisfying job. There is also a four letter word hanging between them (starting with the letter l) that is beginning to gain some importance. After a table-turning fight, Scudder overpowers and tasers Albert. He goes up into the rooftop and finds a shed, where Loogan is living. It takes the eccentricity of diverse ethnic and sexual types in the urban jungle and uses them cynically--first in Lawrence Block's 1992 crime thriller novel and now in director Scott Frank's own kind of Hollywood film noir pornography. Matt Scudder. Meanwhile, when it comes to drug trafficker Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) and his brother Pete (Boyd Holbrook), the wedge between them that ones successful, while the other is a junkie is the same, but changed for the film in a key way. Theyre not working for Pete, though: We see him stoned with a bag of drugs in his hand. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on Lawrence Block's bestselling series of mystery novels, A Walk among the Tombstones stars Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-NYPD cop who now works as an unlicensed private investigator operating just outside the law. But now it's safe to tell you that, ever since I saw him in Michael Collins, Neeson has been up at the top of my personal Scudder wish list. So the changes made by Frank are understandable in that context, but they also make Scudder a less complex, more singularly driven man. Coming Soon. Tombstones really feels like a New York City story, and with some beautiful work from cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., that palpably evokes the neighbourhoods that Scudder haunts in the novel as well. Liam Neeson's late-career resurgence, began, I suppose, with the reprehensible Taken series and has sprung from there into the kind of auto-branding most stars get to enjoy in the prime of their . . Even with Liam Neeson in the lead, its not the most likely project to get a greenlight (and indeed Frank said that without Neeson, this movie would never have happened). He did it as an unhinged dad in "Taken," as a surly air marshal in "Non-Stop" and now as a haunted ex-cop in "Tombstones.". 2014 movie based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Block. It's a better film than the other reviews here would indicate, and a damn sight better than those Taken films. Frank and Block are obviously ripping-off the heinous perversity of the Jame Gumb character in Jonathan Demme's 1991 The Silence of the Lambs (which revived the specter of the sexually queer but pathetic monster). Liam Neeson stars in A Walk Among the Tombstones, an action-thriller based on Lawrence Block's bestselling series of mystery novels. 2023 IndieWire Media, LLC. He is about to give up when they grab another girl and Scudder tries make sure she's returned alive. Now the talented writer-director Scott Frank comes awfully close in his adaptation of one of Blocks better novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Private investigator Matthew Scudder is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife. Hes got the eight-year-sober chip in his pocket to prove it. Cheers! While the film is more of a thriller than an action movie, a few setpieces were added like the graveyard shootout and the final fight to beef up the action quota. Youd cross the street in life if you saw him coming. Password must be at least 8 characters and contain: As part of your account, youll receive occasional updates and offers from New York, which you can opt out of anytime. Overall the book is the superior version and is far more fleshed out, though the movie did a decent job capturing its gritty tone. [11] Producers invited author Block to the set to watch filming. Never have I been so grateful for an absent dialect coach. Directed by Scott Frank. The last scene of the film is Scudder sitting in his apartment, TJ asleep on his couch. So whether he wants to or not, Matts burning shoe leather on the grimy streets of New York. They won't be able to see your review if you only submit your rating. Blurring the lines between right and wrong, Scudder races to track the deviants through the backstreets of New York City before they kill again. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU - where Hawkeye is clearly the best character - to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle. So, what can I do for you? His adaptation of these novels was 1986 's 8 Million Ways to Die, which Jeff! ] Producers invited author Block to the cat-and-mouse storytelling dynamic that they warrant a movie hired by a drug who! Chewing the fat with shop owners and others who might have seen more than they realize although... 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