Man, this movie was cool. Liam Neeson has an edge about him where he can make crappy movies good and good movies exceptional. Non-Stop is an example of a crappy movie that by his sheer presence alone, he was able to improve. A Walk Among The Tombstones is a movie that was good that he made fantastic. While Neeson still plays the gritty cop with a torrid past, he doesn't feel like any of his other characters. No, he's not Bryan Mills from the Taken franchise here. He's a completely new and exciting character with an equally horrific past.
It's also not an action movie. Though it opens with a fantastic shoot-out that sets the tone immediately for the film... it is a detective noir for the most part. It's solving a crime and putting together pieces of a very sadistic and intricate puzzle. Someone has kidnapped a dude's wife. They ask for ransom. He pays the ransom. He doesn't get his wife back. Instead, she is killed and sent to him in pieces. So, he goes to Neeson to find the guys who did it so he can kill the shit out of them. Neeson reluctantly takes the job finding out that the two men responsible for this have been doing this for awhile and are about to do it again unless he can stop them. In less capable hands this movie could've been a Nic Cage pile of cheese. But, because someone who has actually studied scripts and has a decent track record tackled the project, what we're left with is a fun, albiet depressing, thrill ride of seeing how Neeson is going to stop these guys.
What's great about Neeson is that he becomes the character he portrays. And while they all look and, typically, sound the same... they don't always act the same. Yes, the characters in Taken and Non-Stop are essentially carbon copies of one another... he's able to separate most roles. He was perfect as Hannibal in The A-Team, in which he was able to accomplish impossible physical feats. He was dark and troubled in The Grey in which his survival instincts were top notch, but in no way was he sub-human. Yeah, that movie ends with him rushing towards a herd of wolves with broken bottles taped to his fingers... but if you think he made it out of there alive... you've watched too many Liam Neeson movies. It's like part of us want him to be super human. I know I did here. He's fought and beaten and hurt several times in the movie. He isn't able to overpower his attackers with sheer force alone. He isn't able to tap into some past knowledge of snapping a man's neck with his mind. When he's hit with a baseball bat... he goes down. I liked that they kept it realistic, but there was an action movie fan in me that wished he would just own people and no one could even bruise him.
It's a good thriller, but don't expect standard Neeson fare. It's watched more like a good book. It unfolds slowly revealing it's plot little by little, keeping you interested, keeping you watching more, keeping you realizing why you fell in love with Neeson in the first place.
A-
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