Run All Night: Action thriller that leaves no room to waste

Film review: Run All Night

MANILA, Philippines - Just in the first quarter of 2015, Liam Neeson has charted two box-office hits to his name. There’s the third installment of Taken (currently the second top-grossing release of 2015 next to Fifty Shades of Grey) and recently, Liam added the non-stop action thriller, Run All Night, to his growing list of successful films.

Since he shifted to doing action, Liam has belatedly re-directed his career to being a box-office sensation. Obviously, the 62-year-old actor basks in his title. Although, he no longer does hard action like perhaps Jason Statham, Liam still rules consistently at the tills.

In Run All Night, he was described as an “aging hitman,” a tag he apparently does not mind. The action caper is the third film of Liam directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, following Unknown in 2011 and the airplane thriller Non-Stop, shown last year. Clearly, actor and director have established a strong and bankable box-office tandem to date.

In Run All Night, Liam as Jimmy Conlon works with another veteran actor, Ed Harris (best remembered in Apollo 13, Pollock, The Rock or even as Julia Roberts’ fiancé in Stepmom) who plays Shawn Maguire, his mob boss. At the start, they are partners in crime and long-time friends. Jimmy works as Shawn’s loyal hit man, but when Jimmy is forced to kill Shawn’s son, Danny (Boyd Holbrook), things take a different turn.

Jimmy calls up Shawn to tell him that his son Danny is dead. Jimmy also admits to killing Danny, but clearly states to leave his son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) out of the picture. The latter is a family man and modestly earns his keep as a limousine driver, but witnesses murder committed by Danny who kills drug dealers he’s doing business with.

Expectedly, Shawn wants the Conlons to pay for the life of his dear son. So when Danny hunts down Michael, dad Jimmy immediately knows where his loyalty lies and loses no time to protect his son from any imminent danger.

Although father and son are estranged, they are forced to flee together from the cudgels of Shawn — at all cost. However, unlike other enemies who abhor each other from the start, friendship prevails between Jimmy and Shawn until the very end, despite what happened.

Throughout the night, as the Conlons escape for safety in the streets of New York, Michael inevitably gets entangled with the bad guys. Eventually, he learns to forgive Jimmy and calls him “Dad” again.

Nick Nolte makes an unbilled and therefore surprising cameo as Jimmy’s brother, Eddie, who helps father and son evade Shawn. Rapper-actor Common (Lonnie Rashid Lynn) makes an appearance midway into the film, as the hired killer, but someone who will “kill for free” for Shawn. (Common won Best Song for Glory, with John Legend in the recent Oscars for the period film Selma, in which he also appeared).

The ending of Run All Night is not something one can normally see or expect in Liam’s action movies. If anything, the film reunites father and son and rekindles their relationship.

From the title alone, Run All Night is a fast-paced action thriller that leaves one no room to waste even just a few minutes to leave his seat. The film has an R-16 classification presumably because of violence, so definitely, young audiences are not given access to enter the theater.

Liam does not get tired making action movies at this stage in his career. Last year, aside from Non-Stop, he also did A Walk Among the Tombstones. Both films made good money at the box-office. He’s enjoying his newfound status using his “special set of skills” and he’s making hay while the sun shines.