In Run All Night Liam Neeson wakes and lurches up from a dive-bar bench looking like an undead corpse that has just clawed its way out of a grave. There’s a derisive round of applause from the assembled wise-guys and hoodlums. Its fair to say that whatever glory days Jimmy “the Gravedigger” Conlon once had, they are long gone.
Jimmy sidles in to see his best friend and boss, Irish mobster Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris, gravelly and hard-bitten). In a rather contrived piece of dialogue, hired killer Conlon regrets that he is haunted by the faces of the men he has offed over the years. He may be a murderous bastard, but he’s a murderous bastard with a conscience. So that’s all right then.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra is clutching at straws to make sure we can find something with which to sympathise in a character who looks like he smells of cigarettes, cheap bourbon and disappointment and who shoots people for a living.
Jimmy is estranged from his son, Mike (Joel Kinnaman), but when a coincidence puts Mike in the sights of every gangster in town, Jimmy does what does best — he kills everyone. And that’s it: just shy of two hours of Liam Neeson-based slaughter.
There are a couple of solid action set-pieces. A car chase with a difference — Jimmy is pursuing the cops, rather than the other way around — has an anarchic, gung-ho insanity that is good fun. A sequence in a housing block crawling with police and other killers is well executed. But ultimately this is generic stuff and Neeson deserves better. Jaume Collet-Serra, 15, 115min
Advertisement