A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

(Scott Frank, 2014)

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a classical - almost generic - detective noir. And in the modern filmmaking climate of bombast and narratives so post-modern they're self-reflexive without even knowing it, that makes it feel almost radical in its purity and simplicity.
Adapted by writer-director Scott Frank (who has had success with tricky crime adaptations like Out of Sight and Get Shorty in the past) from one of Lawrence Block's long-running Matt Scudder novels, it casts Liam Neeson as the hero, a recovering alcoholic and ex-NYPD detective who now works as a private and unlicensed investigator. Refreshingly, Scudder is not the invincible super-warrior Neeson has played in the Taken films. Instead he is made a little vulnerable by his continued attendance at AA meetings. He takes a couple of beatings here, though his dry wit and fearlessness more than compensate in ensuring he still feels like a hard-boiled tough guy. Neeson is a rare action actor who is equally comfortable with emotional drama, and he gives Scudder a weighty soulfulness and melancholy. That is mostly expressed in the scenes depicting his relationship with TJ, a precocious street kid who fancies himself a detective.
The case brings a streak of nastiness to the film that all the best detective stories really need; throwing a tarnished white Knight into opposition against pure evil raises the stakes massively, and here that pure evil is in the form of two men who abduct the wives and girlfriends of drug dealers and traffickers and torture and kill them. Scudder is put on the case by Kenny (Dan Stevens), a middle class trafficker who paid the ransom demanded by the voice on the telephone and then had his wife delivered in small bags. Digging deep he discovers that these men are serial kidnappers, their depravity shocking.
It all leads, of course, to the sort of extreme ultra violence and gunplay that led Scudder to quit the police, and which Frank shoots with the same sort of classical precision which characterises most of the films old-fashioned virtues. It feels a little like the sort of modest crime adaptation that thrived in the '60s and '70s - Frank knows how this sort of pulp works, understands its pleasures and delivers them. He gets how important the villains are, he can see how crucial a strong sense of place is, and his film takes the time to do both these things right. It is tight, atmospheric, and commendably streamlined in its accurate recreation of the world of Block's novels. It's good to see a star like Neeson use his profile to get a film like this made.

THE WOLVERINE

(James Mangold, 2013)

I can't figure out James Mangold. He seems one of those directors who exists to make the auteur theory seem like nonsense.
Not that he doesn't have consistent thematic interests and concerns - he seems to like stories focusing on individuals at the heart of a storm of events, and he obviously appreciates some 1970s grit in his cinema - but that his films vary so shockingly in terms of quality. His first two films as writer-director promised a great career. Heavy is a sensitive, layered character drama, full of great performances. Copland is a gripping and underrated police corruption thriller, mixing in some Western tropes and a few iconic '70s stars for good measure while dragging a career-best performance from Sylvester Stallone. And then Mangold stumbled. A few times. Girl, Interrupted, Identity and Kate & Leopold are all confused failures, and although the commercial and critical success of Walk the Line suggested redemption, to my eyes, it is a prime biopic bingo movie, stuffed with cliches, overplayed, and never as interesting as the events it dramatises.
After that he went genre again, with the excellent, classical Western remake 3:10 to Yuma, then the nightmarish mess of compromise and tonal shifts that is Knight and Day. Which brings us to The Wolverine. Rewritten by the talented Scott Frank and the not-so-talented Mark Bombeck from Chris McQuarrie's (reportedly far grittier and more down-to-earth) original script, it aims to rejuvenate the labouring franchise career of Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman) after the disaster of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Here he is summoned to Tokyo by the terminally ill business tycoon whose life he saved while he was a POW at Nagasaki on a certain day in 1945. Logan is a mess when we meet him here; still struggling with his role in the death of Jean Grey at the end of Brett Ratner's excreable X-Men: The Last Stand, he has visions of her in his sleep, and basically suffers through his immortality. Well; Japan changes that, plunging him into a gangwar involving yakuza, Ninja, a mutant scientist named Viper, and introducing him to Mariko (Tao Okamoto). Ultimately, after a long spell without his healing factor, Logan learns he has a reason to live, after all. That reason is basically fighting masses of disposable henchmen - here he takes on tattooed, suited yakuza mobsters and an army of ninjas. Mangold is a serviceable action director, no more, setting the most memorable fight scene here atop a speeding bullet train. The finale finds Logan facing off against an enormous armoured samurai battle-suit, and there are a few other martial arts setpieces scattered through the film.
None of them are terrific, however. Instead, The Wolverine is average for most of its duration, dipping into troughs of downright dull all too often. Mangold evidently tries hard to sell the character moments, and Logan's angst is delved into too many times in scenes which are too familiar and mannered to seem anything more than self-parody. The romance occurs during a brief idyll by the sea, but it plays like it came right out of a screenwriting manual, and for all Jackman's commitment and understanding of the role, the emotional material here sits awkwardly with the super-hero stuff. Logan is tortured by his past and inability to die - until its time to kick as, at which point he just kicks ass. That might not be so bad if it was tunning, breathtaking ass-kicking. But it's not.
There are far too many minor characters wheeled in the push plot developments, and despite some nice technical credits - it always looks and sounds good- The Wolverine is a dull, oddly compromised super-hero movie.