Who’s not afraid of Liam Neeson?

Film review: A Walk Among The Tombstones

MANILA, Philippines - Liam Neeson made waves as CIA operative Bryan Mills in the 2008 film Taken because he sounded and appeared too convincing for the character.  

Since then, he has become a major action star and the public might not be surprised if he’s get inserted in the future as an accomplice or antagonist of the Sly Stallone-led Expendables.   

For his new movie A Walk Among The Tombstones, Neeson battles against a couple of serial women abusers whose numbing brutality and sinister looks suddenly shrink once he speaks over them on the phone. Oh, these psychos may have missed seeing Taken.

This time, Neeson plays retired NYPD cop Matt Scudder who reluctantly accepts the under-the-table job of hunting the scumbags down.

Such is the command of Neeson whose breakout role he won in the early ’90s portraying Oskar Schindler that it made sense why he got in the way of the Nazis. In …Tombstones, one of the predators utters something that serves this claim, asking Scudder what’s wrong with him or why he’s not afraid of them or the situation.

The movie, concocted by The Wolverine writer-director Scott Frank, is based on Lawrence Block’s crime thriller novel of the same. The plot revolves around Scudder’s efforts tracking down the killers of the pretty wife of a well-off, heroin-trafficking man. The husband Kenny Kristo is played by Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) whose acting is as believable as Scudder’s investigative know-how.

A stress-inducing, scary atmosphere breathes throughout the film because it’s clear right from the early scenes that Scudder is dealing not with terrorists who may let go their hostages once their demands are given, but with twisted minds kidnapping beautiful girls with the intention to kill and then ask for more.

Playing villains are David Harbour (Quantum of Solace) and Adam David Thompson (Martha Marcy May Marlene) — a deadly combination of a controlling figure and a silently dangerous follower, or as how he seems to be.

One of the scenes that clearly displays that chilling undertone shows an acquaintance of Scudder committing suicide. It’s how he does it that makes it creepy.

Other interesting support characters are Yuri Landau (Sebastian Roche — Beowulf), a drug dealer whose daughter becomes a target of the kidnappers, and TJ (Brian Bradley — Earth To Echo), a young black artist who talks smart enough to get Scudder’s attention.

Kristo’s brother Peter (Boyd Holbrook — Very Good Girls) is the one convincing Scudder to take the job and the gift from his grieving bro. He is a “recovering drug addict” (drugs again!) with a secret that Kenny should find interesting. That is, if he ever finds it.

Distributed by Solar Pictures, … Tombstones is a disturbing tale set in New York 1999, a year before the Y2K scare that brings us to the tagline “People are afraid of all the wrong things.” A glimpse showing the World Trade Center twin towers still standing tall touches deeper through 2001 gave us the real scare.

A Walk Among The Tombstones is now showing in theaters nationwide.