- Neeson and Ed Harris in Run All Night
I’m glad to have caught Run All Night at Lincoln Square’s Davis Theater. No other movie house in Chicago is better suited for this unpretentious (but assured) genre item, the third collaboration in four years between Liam Neeson and Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film harkens back to the years before Redbox (which already feels like a distant era), when thoughtful genre movies for adults regularly got made on big budgets and opened in wide release. A mix of downbeat drama and slickly choreographed violence, Night is too dour to be an action-movie “event” and too pulpy to appeal to Oscar voters. The surface tone is familiar from any of Neeson’s umpteen thrillers of the past six years—in old-school genre fashion, the movie modestly situates itself within a continuum of like-minded entertainment. Similarly the Davis is perhaps the last place in town where one can just go to a movie—there’s no lounge, no alcoholic beverages at the concession stand, no stadium seating or “atmospheric” sound. The auditoriums could probably stand to be renovated, but at six bucks for a matinee, why complain?
An irrepressible stylist, Collet-Serra plays this story for at least one rousing action set piece—a showdown between Neeson and another assassin played by Common that spans multiple buildings of a public housing complex. Moving dynamically across both the x- and y-axes, the sequence recalls one of the highlights of director Tsui Hark’s career, the climax of Time and Tide (2000). But even the excitement of this passage can’t shake the doldrums off Run All Night, nor does the requisite redemption of the Neeson character count for very much. The former thug might make amends with his estranged son, but this happens too late and only as the result of circumstance. That this development represents just a slight variation on the Neeson myth speaks to the melancholy at its core.
