“Run All Night” turns it up to 11 for most scenes.
The sound of punches, gunshots, a knife being thrust into a man’s back over and over and over is juiced for maximum effect. A cooking fire instantly turns into an inferno. A civilian’s auto and a police cruiser engage in a high-speed, reckless game of bumper cars through Queens until one rolls over and into a shop window. Music pounds, like drumbeats, and then pounds again.
And yet the movie is most effective in the few, brief quiet scenes between Ed Harris and Liam Neeson, who are the draw here.
Mr. Harris is Shawn Maguire, a Brooklyn mob boss, and Mr. Neeson is Jimmy Conlon, his best friend and enforcer once nicknamed “The Gravedigger” for the number of hits he carried out. A homicide detective (Vincent D’Onofrio) who runs into Jimmy in a coffee shop hectors him about the number of victims, “Why don’t you just whisper it to me?”
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman.
Rating: R for strong violence, language including sexual references, and some drug use.
These days, Jimmy is a lonely and often drunken figure who is alienated from his son, Michael (Joel Kinnaman), a onetime aspiring boxer who is married with two daughters and a third child on the way. By contrast, Shawn’s only son, Danny (Boyd Holbrook), is trying to move up in the crime world by introducing his father to Albanian drug dealers who want to import heroin and give the mob a cut.
But the deal sours, Danny dies and innocent bystander Michael lives. That sets off a chain of explosive events with dirty cops, an estranged father trying to keep his son and family safe, a vengeful Shawn and onetime allies turned enemies.
“Run All Night” reunites Mr. Neeson with Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spanish-born director of his thrillers “Non-Stop” and “Unknown.” They specialize in muscular action that depends on Mr. Neeson to be a veritable Superman, once he shakes off Jimmy’s taste for booze.
The screenplay, by Brad Ingelsby (“Out of the Furnace”), seems like an attempt to recapture the glory of 1970s dramas although its opening scene gives away part of the ending before spinning the action back 16 hours. And any time a character says, “Wherever we’re going when we cross that line, we’re going together, me and you,” you expect someone to unwillingly make it across the life-death divide.
“Run All Night” turns on coincidences including which cops respond to a call, lapses, background that was lost from the page to the screen, family dynamics that are distracting — a grizzled Nick Nolte plays Mr. Neeson’s brother — a professional killer who has more trouble than expected finding his marks and a scene where someone announces a murderous intention but allows the intended victim to walk away. For now.
Its themes about the sins of the fathers being visited upon their sons, the tug-of-war between crime and biological families, and the imprisonment real or otherwise for a killer are not new. But the 60-something leads and strong actors in smaller roles lift the thriller out of standard R-rated action territory and give it a little room to run.
First Published: March 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
