Title: A Walk Among the Tombstones
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Scott Frank
Starring: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins

What It Is: Called upon to assist drug dealer Kenny Kristo (Stevens) with finding who murder Kenny’s wife retired cop Matt Scudder goes on a manhunt. What he’ll uncover, all the twist and turns will perhaps make the skeletons in everyone’s closet come out and about. Serial killers, drug addicts and homeless teenagers are all over trying to both thwart Scudder’s task at hand, and assist him. What will Scudder uncover? Who killed Kenny’s wife? Are any of these other cases connected? What exactly is wrong with Matt Scudder? Lots of queries hopefully the film is up to answering them.

What We Think: Man this film was violent! It wasn’t your average Liam Neeson actioneer, no this was a murder mystery in the vein of the old film noirs. While it lacked a slick style and even slicker dialogue to those classics it nonetheless bring the visceral violence of a good contemporary crime thriller. It’s beautiful in its filth. What I mean by that is the cinematography is grungy and gritty. Everything looks painted over in a grey primer. This film isn’t the most original around but for what it is it isn’t too shabby. There are times when the tone is off, and its not well-written. Having said that let’s grade this!

Our Grade: B-, Man was I surprised by this! Liam Neeson kicks ass and they let him bloody murder peeps! I mentioned in our Earth to Echo review how much I didn’t like Astro. Well you can leave that box unchecked here. He was a heck of a lot better here! However he along with 95 % of the ancillary characters wasn’t fleshed out enough. Here the writing fails, and the actors and overall film suffer. Frank did a surprisingly  excellent job of building tension, its just too bad that was all for nought as the script just lead to a cliche, or in the endings case a mess.