Movie Review: 'Run All Night'

Liam Neeson's latest movie is yet another killing spree; this time he finds himself the target of a city-wide manhunt after murdering a mobster's son.

Liam Neeson has taken a late-life career decision to reinvent himself as a scowling army-of-one.

In the Taken trilogy, he travelled from France to Istanbul, meting out death and vengeance against hundreds of foreign "terrorists" with dead-eyed abandon. In The A-Team, where he played Colonel Hannibal Smith, a few hundred more souls were sacrificed on the altar of Hollywood entertainment, and this is before we count the losses in Non-Stop, where Neeson takes his violence to the skies.

Run All Night is another killing spree in the usual vein, in which he plays Jimmy Conlon, a drunken has-been who was once an enforcer for the Irish mob in New York, but now lies around in alcoholic oblivion, taking jobs as Santa Claus to pull in a few extra bucks.

Conlon's old boss and close friend Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) turns down a deal with Albanian heroin dealers, and Conlon ends up having to shoot Maguire's son to protect his own.

Maguire takes the death very personally, and within the course of a single night, Conlon and his son (Joel Kinnaman) find themselves the subjects of a city-wide manhunt as Maguire and his personal army of thick-necked thugs, not to mention the police force and various gangsters, all converge on him. The premise is set for Neeson to do his trigger-happy thing: to defend his son and clear his name, he will have to reap at least another 20 souls in tense displays of shooting and close-quarters combat.

Over the next 16 hours, he will come into a more intimate relationship with his estranged son than he's ever known, and you have to marvel at the filmmakers for turning a harrowing night of carnage into a heart-warming father-son bonding experience in which justice is served and daddy issues resolved.

 The film has a very videogame feel to it, and as our heroes flee through the abandoned alleys and arteries of a darkly visualised New York, you can feel some of the presence of the first Max Payne.

I guess Neeson brings the best range of acting you could to an action film this generic. Although he's called on to pull the trigger several times, he always manages to twist his face into an apology or regret, a "this hurts me more than you" kind of look.

In this sense, he is a killer with a conscience, and, in his bottle-green army coat and with his glazed-over eyes, sometimes recalls Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.

The bloodlust weaves its way throughout the film, and later a hi-tech assassin with a futuristic eye-piece (played by rapper Common) is sent after the lads. He dogs them throughout the city, refusing to die after each prolonged shoot-out. It's lucky for Neeson that the shooting skills and general accuracy of his pursuers could be generously figured at about 0.8%, allowing him to dodge a hailstorm of lead throughout the two hours he is shot at and live as long as he needs to.

If there's anything those confected and nameless bad guys of Hollywood's imagination should learn, it's not to mess with Neeson, because in the past 10 years alone he has amassed a kill ratio on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that would give even Texas Rangers cause to tremble.

Run All Night is an ordinary action film about extraordinary amounts of violence.

Rating: 3/5