●●●○○

Adapted from Lawrence Block’s bestselling crime novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones stars Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-NYPD cop turned unlicensed private detective and recovering alcoholic. One of his friends from AA leads him to Kenny, a heroin trafficker whose wife has been kidnapped and murdered, and Scudder soon becomes entangled in the search for two serial killers who target the wives and children of wealthy drug dealers. Despite an excellent performance from Neeson, whose character’s dry sense of humour makes him thoroughly likeable, the film is undermined by Scudder’s implausible sidekick, a homeless teenager named TJ (Brian “Astro” Bradley, a former American X Factor contestant).

Like many serial killer films, A Walk Among the Tombstones portrays its urban environment as a doom-laden hellscape, with dilapidated streets and perpetual rainfall. The film is set in 1999, amidst the pre-millennial tension of the Y2K scare, and throughout the film various ads and newspaper headlines yell, “Are you Y2K ready?” and “GUNS ON RISE”. A brilliant scene follows the killers through the mundane task of making breakfast at home, and one of them muses, while reading the newspaper, “People are afraid of all the wrong things.” Scudder is himself suspicious of mobile phones and computers, and does his research in the New York Public Library, a far more visually striking setting than if he were at home on a PC.

The suspense of the climactic cemetery scene is sadly undone by the jarring overuse of freeze frames, intercut with a character reading the Twelve Steps of AA. The finale, a tense showdown in a basement, is genuinely compelling, despite its predictability. Scudder is an intriguing lead, and hopefully this dark, engaging film will leave behind his teenage assistant and grow into a film series.