A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014)
This one i really didn't get on with first time round but i still picked it up on Blu-ray from Poundland a few years ago and now have got round to actually watching said Blu.
It's a strange film, unrelentingly dark, i don't think there's even the merest hint of humour anywhere in this two hour film, and yet i enjoyed it so much more this second time.
It's desperate to be a hard boiled P.I. story from the forties, probably with Robert Mitchum or Alan Ladd in the lead rather than Liam Neeson but it's 2014, not 1942 and neither of those two are available. Neeson's actually fine as the weary looking private detective on a case for Dan Steven's drug trafficker who has his wife kidnapped and held for ransom by seemingly rogue D.E.A. agents - that's just the start, it gets deeper after this - it's a pretty meaty, talky role for an actor normally associated with shit kicking action in recent years, and i think it's this lack of action that made me not like it to begin with.
The film often ventures albeit fleetingly into torture porn, including the opening credits where you think it's two people making love in close up until you see images of the gag over the woman's mouth and the fact she's strapped to a plastic covered table, basically it starts as it means to go on.
It all adds to the bleak yet gripping atmosphere on offer, an atmosphere that doesn't dissipate as the end credits roll thanks to a beautifully performed torch ballad version of Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun by Swann Feat. Nouela. A Walk Among the Tombstones is a very apt title for this movie.
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