RUN ALL NIGHT (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.; Jaume Collet-Serra, 2015.

Why doesn’t Liam Neeson make movies today like Schindler’s List or Michael Collins?

In any case, Liam Neeson’s late-career blossoming as a fatherly, soulful  action star– which commenced with the genuinely absurd, if genuinely exciting melodrama Taken — continues apace with the not quite as absurd and  somewhat more exciting Run All Night   — a movie with lots of people getting killed (many of them by Neeson‘s screen character), and lots of explosions, car-chases and gunfights, raging all around and about New York City. All this carnage is sometimes skillfully done by director Jaume Collet-Serra and his gang, and sometimes movingly executed by Neeson,  an actor who gives these crash-a-thons and killfests more soulfulness, and more fatherliness,  than they really deserve.

This time out, Neeson plays Jimmy Conlon, a drunken, melancholy  and timeworn hit man, nicknamed “The Gravedigger,” whose life has fallen to pieces, and who tells us his story, while seemingly dying in the woods on Christmas Day, with his would-be killer lurking nearby. “I’ve done some terrible things in my life,“ whispers Catholic Jimmy, yearning for expiation and last rites, “Things for which I cannot be forgiven.”  But he’ll try — and his final race toward damnation and redemption begins sixteen hours earlier, after being humiliated in a bar and at a Christmas party (where he played a very bad Santa) by an awful young man named Danny Maguire (Boyd Holbrook), who was the son of his only remaining friend, ex-boyhood pal, lifelong employer , and now rich and famous (and perhaps soon to be retired) mobster Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris).

Jimmy runs afoul of Shawn, by killing his worthless but nonetheless well-loved son Danny, who unwisely tries to involve Shawn with some reckless Albanian heroin dealers (an offer Shawn, like Don Corleone, refuses). The Albanians (from whom Danny has already been paid his finder’s fee and spent it) are then unwisely massacred by the impetuous youth, who then tries to kill the limo  driver who witnessed these murders, a driver who turns out to be Jimmy’s only son, Michael (Joel Kinnaman).

Unfortunately for everybody, Danny is right in Michael’s father’s gunsight when he tries to kill Michael. And soon father Jimmy and son  (a straight arrow who hates his father‘s profession)– are being pursued by Shawn, his gang, the cops — especially the bad-tempered Detective Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio) who has been after Shawn and Jimmy for decades — Shawn’s new favored hit man Andrew Price (Common), and what seems to be half the boroughs of New York and half the mountains in Albania.

An oddity in Brad Ingelsby‘s script: It was Jimmy who killed Danny, blowing him away just as he’s about to shoot Michael. But it’s Michael whom Shawn has designated as the main victim, to be followed by Jimmy, of course, but only after Jimmy knows that his own son has been killed. Why didn’t writer Ingelsby and director Jaume Collet-Serra (who also helmed Neeson in the even more implausible Unknown and Non-Stop) simply have Michael be the one who, in self defense, killed Danny?

In any case, Jimmy, who hasn’t been much of a father up to now (Michael complains that he was always leaving guns around the house) is now the only man in New York, it seems who can keep Michael alive — pursued as he is by crooks, cops, killers and various other bad and good people with or without guns — including Bruce McGill (who once played Hemingway and also one of the Delta House boys and here is Shawn‘s consigliere) and a haggard-looking Nick Nolte (as Jimmy‘s brother), reciting a few lines for which we hope he was very well paid.

While the Spanish-born Collet-Serra covers all the action by zipping from one location to another via sped-up helicopter shots and zooms, the filmmakers liven up the night by staging a fire in a housing project (home of another potential witness, a kid named “Legs” Banks (Aubrey Joseph)) — and also a police car chase, a race through a night-drenched train yard and many, many gunfights. All this is apparently remembered by Jimmy (including of course everything he saw and also everything he didn‘t see, including what happened in the empty room where the fire started), or maybe watched by some helicopter-borne priest granting absolution to everybody fit for it, or likeliest of all, by God himself , seated at His heavenly computer, banging away at a list of all the sins, venial and mortal and otherwise, being committed in Jimmy’s last 16 hours as — this man alone finally employing his deadly talents for good instead of evil — he wends his soulful, fatherly way   the soulful, fatherly yet bloody climax we know is coming. And to Purgatory. Or wherever.

I must say I liked all this better than the other Collet-Serra  nightmares and the Luc Besson shoot-‘em-ups Neeson has been shooting, mostly because Jimmy Conlon and Shawn Maguire are more interesting characters than Takwn‘s Superdad. Ed Harris’s flair for wounded stares has rarely been as well-deployed.

So. Why can’t Liam make movies today like Schindler’s List or Michael Collins — movies where his heroic stature would pay off in more than car-chases and gunfights and clichés, endlessly repeated?   The basic absurdity of these stories — the notion that Neeson’s Jimmy is capable of battling it out all night with what seems a small army of bad guys —  is on nutty display here too. And as the absurdity ante is upped, and things get loonier and loonier, it’s only the actors, Nolte’s squib role  included, who keep things whipping along.

There are certainly better Irish hit man thrillers than this one — Mike Hodges’ (not very well-reviewed) A Prayer for the Dying, for example. In that movie, Mickey Rourke had the Neeson part and Neeson had a  supporting role,  and since then, a lot of blood has gone under the bridge. Run All Night, a movie derived from other movies, is entertaining enough. But we’d be better served  if this talented cast and company were expending their energies on, say, a brilliant script like F. L. Green’s for the 1947 Carol Reed I.R.A. man-on-the-run masterpiece Odd Man Out. There an immense schism between a movie like Odd Man Out and a movie like Run All Night, and unfortunately that bridge isn’t crossed often enough.

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