Review ‘Run All Night’ From Editor

Someday the mobsters, petty thugs and crooked cops of the world will finally get it through their thick skulls that you should never, ever mess with Liam Neeson’s family — not that audiences have reason to complain in the meantime, so long as they keep getting action pictures as straightforward and robustly satisfying as “Run All Night.”

Run All Night starring Liam Neeson is about two men, Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson) and his son Mike Conlon (Joel Kinnaman), who are being framed by the local New York mob for the death of the mob leader’s son, Danny. The plot takes off when Mike is being targeted by Danny after Mike witnesses a murder committed by some of the members of the mob. Once Jimmy realizes that his son is in trouble, he comes to the rescue and ends up killing Danny. Upon hearing that his son is dead, the head of the gang, Shawn, sets out to kill Jimmy, Mike, and Mike’s family. It is up to Jimmy to use the skills he learned while in the mob to protect his son, his son’s family, and himself from the wrath of this notorious gang of killers.

Remarkably, despite the narrative’s compact 16-hour time frame, an entire gangland history manages to come into fleeting focus, as Collet-Serra freights even the most offhand exchanges of dialogue (and gunfire) with a disquieting intimacy that underscores his characters’ shared experience: Whether conceived on a grand scale or in close quarters, the violence always feels personal.

If there’s a weakness in the clean, economical screenplay by Brad Ingelsby (who co-scripted 2013’s “Out of the Furnace”), it’s that Neeson’s character seems perhaps too forlorn a figure at the outset, an impression that doesn’t entirely jibe with the keen-witted man of action who emerges later. Once known as “the Gravedigger,” the deadliest arrow in the quiver of respected Brooklyn kingpin Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), Jimmy is now a hopeless hanger-on, stuck nursing a lifetime’s worth of regrets with endless glasses of whiskey, and forced to earn quick cash by performing humiliating favors for Shawn’s son and heir, Danny (Boyd Holbrook).

Handsome, spoiled, callow and monstrous, Danny has clearly absorbed the elder Maguire’s ruthlessness but none of his professional scruples or life knowledge. By contrast, Jimmy’s lone son, Mike (Joel Kinnaman), has become a paragon of working-class virtue — a dutiful family man who wants nothing to do with his old man and his life of crime.

With the various intergenerational contrasts and parallels thus established, all the long-simmering tensions suddenly explode one winter evening when Mike, a limo driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, witnesses Danny blowing away an Albanian heroin dealer. (For all its general superiority to the “Taken” movies, “Run All Night” is no improvement in the ethnic sensitivity department.) In short order, Mike is forced to renew ties with the hated Jimmy, his only hope of staying alive and ensuring the safety of his pregnant wife (Genesis Rodriguez) and two daughters (Giulia Cicciari, Carrington Meyer).

In one of the script’s shrewder gambits, Jimmy’s instinctive decision to side with his own blood has the immediate effect of severing all ties to his employer, something both sides accept with almost matter-of-fact resignation. Viewers may be reminded of the similarly strict gangland protocols that governed last year’s Keanu Reeves starrer “John Wick,” in which longtime business associates, faced with an unexpected personal betrayal, calmly negotiated the terms under which they would proceed to obliterate each other.

With its grim, fatalistic twists and brooding air of patriarchal anxiety — this is a world where sons are doomed to suffer the consequences of their fathers’ mistakes, or repeat them to even more damaging effect — “Run All Night” doesn’t exactly cover new ground. (One narrative digression feels particularly unnecessary in its attempt to crank up Mike’s resentment of Jimmy; mainly, it exists to justify an unbilled cameo from an actor whose presence is welcome but not essential.) Yet even when he’s dealing with this boilerplate material, Collet-Serra brings an understated intensity and a subtle emotional pull to every scene, aided immeasurably by actors who invest their roles, big and small, with just the right degree of conviction.

By now it should come as a surprise to no one that Neeson has become perhaps our most consistently reliable and bankable action hero, and “Run All Night” ably taps into his reserves of grit and gravitas as Jimmy leaps into action, takes down enemy assailants, and above all protects those he loves, even if it means sometimes ramming them off the road. As ever, the actor’s handsome, careworn face seems capable of projecting decency and tenderness as well as cruelty, perfect for the role of a cold-blooded killer we intuitively trust.

Jimmy’s interactions with his old friend-turned-nemesis Shawn are among the film’s most affecting moments, not least because Harris is one of the few actors capable of looking utterly dead-eyed while still possessing a certain soulful twinkle. Also leaving strong impressions are Bruce McGill as Shawn’s formidable No. 2 and Vincent D’Onofrio as one of the few honest cops in a city overrun with police corruption.

Looking back at the entirety of the film, it had a lot of good things going for it.  First, who doesn’t love a movie centered around taking down an entire mob? Neeson single handedly destroys this group of individuals who have been wreaking havoc upon New York City for years, and the way he does it is really something to watch.

Also, the action scenes within the movie were fun to watch because they were not dragged out and filled with a bunch of unnecessary stunts, but rather had the right amount of action in it; especially when Neeson’s character showed off his knife skills. Overall, “Run All Night” was fun, intense, and satisfying film to watch on whatever occasion it is that you are going out to the movies for.

‘Run All Night‘ is now playing in theaters today!

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