The Underrated Liam Neeson Crime Thriller On Netflix
By now, most audiences are aware of Liam Neeson’s status as an action thriller star, best known for taking on hordes of enemies at once in non-stop thrill rides such as Taken, The Grey, and The A-Team. In 2014’s mystery thriller A Walk Among The Tombstones, Liam Neeson stars as a private investigator hired by a drug kingpin to solve a mysterious crime. The film is available to stream on Netflix now.
Lost amid Liam Neeson’s other action releases, A Walk Among The Tombstones is an underrated thriller streaming on Netflix.
A Walk Among The Tombstones combines two of Liam Neeson’s best qualities as a performer, allowing him to show off his impeccable fighting skills as a physical powerhouse while making great use of the actor’s unflinching humanity.
The film was written and directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Scott Frank, best known for screenwriting the hit 2017 film Logan, starring Hugh Jackman. Frank recently went on to create, write, and direct the Netflix mini-series The Queens Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
A Walk Among The Tombstones stars Liam Neeson alongside a number of big-name actors such as Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens, The Predator‘s Boyd Holbrook, and Stranger Things‘ David Harbour. The film is based on a 1992 novel of the same name written by American crime writer Lawrence Block and serves as the second time the character of Matt Scudder has been brought to the big screen, according to IMDb.
Before he appeared in A Walk Among The Tombstones played by Liam Neeson, Matt Scudder was portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the 1986 film 8 Million Ways To Die. Block has penned over seventeen novels in the long-running series, the most recent of which was released in 2011. The events of A Walk Among The Tombstones adapt the tenth book in the long-running series as a standalone adventure.
2014’s A Walk Among The Tombstones follows Liam Neeson’s Matt Scudder as he pays his bills performing private detective work in New York. As a disgraced former detective, Scudder is willing to work outside of the law with a number of unsavory characters, including a local drug dealer named Kenny Kristo. Kristo explains to Scudder that his wife has been kidnapped and subsequently murdered despite having paid the ransom that the kidnappers demanded.
A Walk Among The Tombstones was a quiet hit, bringing in $62 million against a budget of $28 million, but it was overshadowed by The Maze Runner.
In A Walk Among The Tombstones, Liam Neeson’s Matt Scudder is joined by a street-wise homeless youth named TJ, who assists him in making connections among the criminal underworld. Scudder and TJ begin to follow ledes that uncover corruption within the DEA, as well as a conspiracy by international drug trafficking rings that threaten to start an all-out gang war on the streets of New York.
As tensions continue to rise, Scudder brings TJ under his wing after learning that the boy has sickle cell anemia and is in declining health.
From there, Scudder and his team set up a sting in order to catch the kidnappers in the middle of a handoff with their next victim. When a shootout ensues, A Walk Among The Tombstones becomes an all-out gunfight, featuring one of Liam Neeson’s most gripping action sequences to date. The conclusion features a revolving door of gunshots that ring out, killing hordes of thugs, leading to the police finally taking down the drug traffickers.
A Walk Among The Tombstones is one of Liam Neeson’s best action movies, combining a tense thriller with gunplay.
Though A Walk Among The Tombstones did very well at the box office, the film received mixed reviews from critics.
The Liam Neeson-led movie made over $62 million at the worldwide box office against an estimated production budget of only $28 million, opening at number two at the box office behind The Maze Runner. The film holds a solid 68 percent score on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, though the audience score clocks in at only 53 percent.
To this day, A Walk Among The Tombstones remains one of Liam Neeson’s most underrated movies, which fans of the Northern Irish actor would surely be elated to check out. Though modern film fans have largely forgotten the nearly decade-old movie, it holds some of the best action sequences in Liam Neeson’s long and storied career while still giving the actor room to perform as a deep and nuanced character. A Walk Among The Tombstones is available to stream now on Netflix.
