Dead in the city

A cemetery figures prominently in A Walk Among the Tombstones, but it’s the metaphorical graveyard—a dying city, a culture of violence, moral rot—that proves haunting in the biggest ways in the film. It has a retired New York City cop (Liam Neeson) getting deeper and deeper into an off-the-books search for the perpetrators of a murder-kidnap scheme that targets the wives, lovers and daughters of local drug traffickers.

Writer-director Scott Frank (working from the novel by Lawrence Block) maintains a scary kind of dramatic tension right from the start. Part of that comes from generic sources—vicious crimes, sadistic villains. But there’s a more complex and disturbing kind of suspense arising from the motley crew of variously unhinged characters attempting to track down those villains.

Matt Scudder (Neeson) has a haunted past of his own, and that seems to make him both reluctant and obsessive in his deepening involvement in all this. The paradoxes and duplicities of his character find peculiar echoes in the conduct of his less reputable cohorts, including especially the aggrieved drug kingpin Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) and Kenny’s sad sack, drug-addicted brother Pete (Boyd Holbrook). A street kid named TJ (Brian “Astro” Bradley) and the villains’ portly accomplice (”lafur Darri ”lafsson) serve as variously ironic foils as well.

The violence is graphic, grisly and—in terms of genre—anything but routine. It’s partly a story about men and boys drawn to violence, but in Frank’s rendering, that violence is repellent at the very least, and never glorified, even when seemingly justifiable.