Lawrence Block has proved himself a worthy successor to the holy trinity of American crime novelists, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and James M Cain. Block's Matt Scudder almost inevitably shares a number of qualities and characteristics with his antecedents Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade - both namechecked here in AWATT; but while he's certainly no Bogart, Liam Neeson proves himself more than worthy of the task of at last bringing Block's anti-hero detective to the screen (let's ignore Jeff Bridges' misfire in 8 Million Ways to Die - everyone else did).
In AWATT, writer-director Scott Frank, erasing - for good, one hopes - the aberrant stain on his CV that was Marley and Me, delivers a dark, bleak thriller whose fuse burns too slowly for the peanut-brained generation MTV, but which will prove richly satisfying to grown-up noir movie fans.
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. I'll never be able to watch re-runs of Downton Abbey in quite the same light after seeing Dan Stevens' transformative turn here as a bereaved and vengeful drug dealer. And we'll surely be seeing a lot more of 'Astro' Brian Bradley, who has instantly become indispensable as Scudder's informal sidekick TJ.
Admittedly the plot is as straightforward as Chandler's were complex. But as Chandler himself ultimately showed, plot can and perhaps should be secondary to character, atmosphere and style in this genre - qualities A Walk Among the Tombstones has in (Sam) spades. Indeed, where AWATT really scores is in its pervading aura of menace, of gloom, of doom even. Adam Sandler it ain't, and thank the Lord - and Scott Frank, the movie's producers and its studio backers - for that.
So the psychos' motivation is never spelled out? That's good, I say. The scariest kind of bad guys are often the ones with zero back-story - evil needs no explanation or justification; it just is.
Block purists might query the faithfulness of Scott Frank's adaptation of the source novel - the ending sexes up Scudder's action-hero credentials, for obvious commercial reasons. (Read the full Scudder canon and you'll be surprised - and not a tad frustrated - at how low-key the endings can be.) But for this hardcore Lawrence Block fan at least, A Walk Among the Tombstones is about as much as I could have hoped for from an industry now largely geared up to produce CGI-drenched pabulum. Not a great movie, but a very good one.
In AWATT, writer-director Scott Frank, erasing - for good, one hopes - the aberrant stain on his CV that was Marley and Me, delivers a dark, bleak thriller whose fuse burns too slowly for the peanut-brained generation MTV, but which will prove richly satisfying to grown-up noir movie fans.
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. I'll never be able to watch re-runs of Downton Abbey in quite the same light after seeing Dan Stevens' transformative turn here as a bereaved and vengeful drug dealer. And we'll surely be seeing a lot more of 'Astro' Brian Bradley, who has instantly become indispensable as Scudder's informal sidekick TJ.
Admittedly the plot is as straightforward as Chandler's were complex. But as Chandler himself ultimately showed, plot can and perhaps should be secondary to character, atmosphere and style in this genre - qualities A Walk Among the Tombstones has in (Sam) spades. Indeed, where AWATT really scores is in its pervading aura of menace, of gloom, of doom even. Adam Sandler it ain't, and thank the Lord - and Scott Frank, the movie's producers and its studio backers - for that.
So the psychos' motivation is never spelled out? That's good, I say. The scariest kind of bad guys are often the ones with zero back-story - evil needs no explanation or justification; it just is.
Block purists might query the faithfulness of Scott Frank's adaptation of the source novel - the ending sexes up Scudder's action-hero credentials, for obvious commercial reasons. (Read the full Scudder canon and you'll be surprised - and not a tad frustrated - at how low-key the endings can be.) But for this hardcore Lawrence Block fan at least, A Walk Among the Tombstones is about as much as I could have hoped for from an industry now largely geared up to produce CGI-drenched pabulum. Not a great movie, but a very good one.