Review of A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) by Meritcoba — 08 Jul 2016

"A walk among tombstones" comes over as a failed tango: it limps and stumbles from the outset. Its biggest flaw is also its strongest and only asset : Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson is a great actor but he has to play against...himself and only himself. And this then is the sad truth really, for all the other actors feel like extras even though an attempt is made to couple the young Astor(?) with him. An attempt that mostly fails because of its obvious cheesy aspect and failure of giving the relation any sufficient depth.

While there is no reason to suppose that a story requires two or more people to make it work, it is not easy to pull it off. I have a hard time trying to recall a movie that has just one central figure in it and nobody else.

Liam thus dominates every scene and he doesn't bore, but it is a talent wasted in a movie that doesn't put him up against a great adversary or gives him a brilliant sidekick. If I hold it up against a movie like the Maltese Falcon,.

Bogart is up against the likes of a Syndney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. And Mary Astor makes for a great femme fatale. In Bladerunner Ford spars with Rutget Hauer, Sean Young, the latter who might not be a great actor, but was the right person at the right place. And in the Silence of the Lambs, Foster and Hopkins make the movie.

Liam has nobody that remotely helps him make the movie. Hence the movie is nothing but an okay movie, with some flaws and silly turns, but lacking that essential human interaction that makes a movie greater. The point to learn is that a movie is perhaps like a tango.