The second feature in this week's Dan Stevens Film Festival (along with THE GUEST) actually brings to the big screen the wildly popular Matt Scudder character from more than a dozen books by Lawrence Block. Stevens doesn't play Scudder; that honor goes to Liam Neeson, who actually digs his teeth into the role in a way he really hasn't in many of his recent action fare (with THE GREY maybe being the exception). A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES film opens with then-New York detective Scudder involved in the foot chase/shootout that lead to him deciding to leave the force to eventually become the unlicensed private detective solving the grisly crimes that so many readers know and love and fear.
Most of the film takes place many years after the opening incident. In fact, it's nearing the end of the year 1999, when the world was a slightly nuttier place. There is a prevailing dread of Y2K, with some believing planes will fall out of the sky, and maybe the world might end too. The universe was considerably more paranoid—either about specific things shutting down or a more non-specific, free-floating anxiety. Scudder is many years sober, and one of his many AA pals, Howie (Eric Nelsen) comes to him on behalf of his rich brother Kenny (Stevens), whose wife was kidnapped the night before. Although he didn't call the cops and paid the ransom, she was viciously butchered, left in pieces in an abandoned car for the husband to find. Naturally, Kenny wants revenge, and Scudder quickly deduces that Kenny isn't just some Joe whose wife was randomly selected, but he's a fairly successful drug trafficker, whose wife was carefully chosen because the kidnappers knew he had money. Scudder reluctantly takes the assignment of finder the killers and delivering them to Kenny.
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES features some truly brutal crime (most is thankfully kept off camera, but we know what's happening), as well as a great deal of great specifics about Scudder's investigation that are ten times more interesting than anything you'll catch on a televised police procedural. Scudder takes on something of an assistant in the form of a young, smart homeless kid named TJ (Brian "Astro" Bradley), who asks all the right questions and has a mind for deductive reasoning. I also really liked Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (the drunken helicopter pilot of THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY) as James, a cemetery caretaker who found body parts of another victim of these killers and inadvertently becomes a suspect. He's the perfect level of creepy in a film dripping with deviant behavior.
One of the elements I liked from director Scott (THE LOOKOUT) Frank's screenplay is that the identity of the killers (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) isn't a mystery. We see them throughout the film, lining up their next victim and eventually executing the kidnapping. So this isn't a film trying to solve a mystery; it's about Scudder arranging a scenario that puts him face to face with these maniacs. As much as Neeson's character has been trained as a police officer many years earlier, he is not the same kind of man with "a very particular set of skills" that he is in the Taken films or Non-Stop. He's a flawed man, whose best laid plans don't always go as plotted, and sometimes people die.
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES moves at a brisk pace and packs a lot of information and details into its under two-hour running time. Scudder is not troubled (much) by breaking the law to do his job. Truth be told, that's pretty much why people hire him. He still flashes his police badge like he's police, but in reality the badge carries about as much actual weight as a stick of butter. The film is also a terrific examination of the underworld of New York City in a period of transition.
Scudder is one of the most flawed heroes that Neeson has played, but he's also a man who's aware of most of his defects and is slowly working to correct them or at least keep them in check. The level of self examination that he and a few of the other people in his life are allowed to have is a testament to how powerful character development can be in a drama like this one, and Frank's screenplay has some great touches and flourishes to keep things interesting. A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES certainly has its shortcomings—the overlong ending stands out—but for the most part, it's a taut, nasty bit of storytelling that I'm hoping will lead to Neeson playing this character again in the future.
