A Walk Among the Tombstones has been in various stages of development since the late 90's and while it's a decent enough film, it's hard to see what kept this story on the development back burner for almost two decades and not simply just forgotten about. It's a pulpy noir about an ex-cop turned private investigator, who is hired by a drug trafficker to find the two men who abducted his wife and chopped her into dozens of pieces after he paid the ransom. Neeson underplays his performance nicely, considering the character's back story has him a recovered alcoholic, with no ties to his family, who accidentally shot a little girl - and Neeson could have overdone it with the brooding, but he does good work here. Scott Frank's screenplay is all straightforward business, there's very little of his usual wit on display and there's no surprises. It's a grim throwback to small films a few decades past. The film's largest problem is how the killers are presented and it's at this point that the film doesn't really gel. There's an aire of mystery about these two monstrous killers who are targeting the family members of drug dealers, but that's dropped when the film simply and un-dramatically introduces the two men not too far into this story. They were obscured by shadow and darkness early on and then directed as if clouding their identity a few scenes earlier never happened. The scenes with the two serial killers just aren't strong enough and any mystery or foreboding sense of dread that the film had, vanishes the more time we spend with those two. There's also a half baked friend/mentor relationship between Neeson and a young homeless boy, that doesn't feel extraneous, but isn't fleshed out enough to be believable. A Walk Among the Tombstones is well made and certainly never boring, but with all that time the film languished in development hell, it's a shame Frank didn't deliver a stronger screenplay.
Review of A Walk Among the Tombstones
