Review of Run All Night (2015) by Mark M — 12 Mar 2015

Run All Night isn't going to be known as a great genre piece but it certainly is a breath of fresh air for Liam Neeson's career after Olivier Megaton's taint called Taken 3 from earlier this year as Neeson teams up with director Jaume Collet-Serra yet again after Non-Stop (2014). More in line with Neeson's prior work in A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), Run All Night or RAN - cute - has the career workhorse Neeson taking on yet another - typecast or not - role as a broken man with a haunted past and unlike Taken 3, Neeson doesn't phone his performance in and instead presents an equal mix of dramatic and the expected Neeson-esque snarky performance - now a norm with the actor - that bounces off well with that of Ed Harris and Joel Kinnaman's performance.

Set against the backdrop of Christmas Eve - only ever reminded occasionally with Neeson's character Jimmy as a stand-in Santa Claus for his crime buddies, the brief passing extras adorned with festive hats and Christmas decorations -, RAN's tale of family, brotherhood, guilt, redemption and retribution pits long-time friends, crime boss Shawn and Jimmy, an ex-hitman that served under the former against each other as the latter's son becomes involved with Shawn's worthless son, Danny (Holt McCallany), following a subplot involving Albanian gangsters that the narrative naturally leaves hanging after the actual plot kicks off with dead police officers and a beardless Common.

Moving from Non-Stop's claustrophobic interior of an airplane to the equally claustrophobic series of packed streets, back alleys and buildings in New York City, Collet-Serra's knack for filming within symmetrical sets of varying situations allows the audience to take in the many horizontal and vertical urban sequences that the Conlon duo are forced to traverse in an attempt to escape their many pursuers, from scaling down an apartment floor-to-floor and a trainyard sequence.

Further forgoing the incessant cuts and shaky cam to hide the fact that Neeson is getting too old for physical roles - as how the two gimmicks were milked extensively throughout Taken 3 -, Collet-Serra presents a balanced set of melee and gun-based sequences that aren't exactly anything that would make anyone drop to their knees in joy over but proves to be serviceable enough beside the performances by Neeson, Harris and Kinnaman to soothe the audience until 2015's slate of summer action blockbusters rolls around.