Review: A Walk Among the Tombstones

City Paper grade: B

There's nothing particularly innovative about Liam Neeson's latest dad-vengeance vehicle, which trailers are packaging as an off-brand Taken 3. But beyond that misleading layer of marketing, there's a stylish, satisfying American private-dick tale to be told, one that sounds like a paperback and sprints like one, too. Matthew Scudder, novelist Lawrence Block's most successful investigator, has been committed to film before, but Scott Frank, familiar with this world thanks to 2007's tonally congruent The Lookout, allows Neeson to hammer out his own interpretation. Throwing on a series of unremarkable coats with upturned collars and snub-nosed revolvers up the sleeves, his Scudder is nothing we haven't seen before — a forever-haunted ex-cop who's also an alcoholic, you say? — but lucky for us, the scumbags and street saints he associates with pay out more than they're expected to. Hired by a boyish drug trafficker (Dan Stevens, nicely shaking off Downton Abbey) to locate the men who kidnapped his wife, Scudder shows off his meat-and-potatoes investigatory style in straight-ahead sequences, played up by a drab, dirty NYC-in-1999 setting. The uncertainty associated with the Y2K bug, silly to look back on but scary at the time, is underplayed as a motif, but Frank deals dread in other ways — murder as a joy and as a function, addiction and its insistence on sticking around. All this, of course, is punctuated by old-fashioned action that isn't afraid to go grotesque. As Scudder's kid protégé TJ, Brian "Astro" Bradley delivers the standout performance, a precocious, mouthy homeless teen who's quick to name-drop Sam Spade.