Run All Night

The recent live action/​animation hybrid movie The Con­gress pos­tu­lat­ed on a future where the image of a movie star could be ful­ly digi­tised via com­plex motion-cap­ture sen­sors so they could insert­ed in films with­out hav­ing to phys­i­cal­ly be present. A pur­loined image would be manip­u­lat­ed to order, for what­ev­er func­tion audi­ences would require at any giv­en time.

It’s a fan­ci­ful notion which, ethics aside, seems like it could be fea­si­ble from a tech­no­log­i­cal stand­point. The recent career of Liam Nee­son would sug­gest that it some dank Hol­ly­wood cel­lar some­where, the kit is semi func­tion­al and already being test­ed. How else would the bur­ley, 62-year-old star be able to appear in such a vast pro­lif­er­a­tion of row­dy, Bron­sonesque B‑pictures (“drunk­ies”) which large­ly draw on the same mem­o­rised lex­i­con of expres­sions, emo­tion­al beats, karate chops to the face and, often, lines of salty dialogue?

If Nee­son has been dig­i­tal­ly cloned and, while we gawp at him on screen, he’s sat on a beach in Tahi­ti flanked by Play­boy Bun­nies, vin­tage sports cars and wheel­bar­rows full of Iran­ian caviar, Run All Night is a film which sug­gests that the cre­ative team mat­ters. Able Span­ish direc­tor Jaume-Col­let Ser­ra (Unknown, Non-Stop) takes the reigns of this more-than-ser­vice­able, New Yoik, ​’70s-style revenge/s­core-set­tling thriller in which Nee­son plays a one-time mob hench­man who has now descend­ed into booze, fags and army-sur­plus threads. His name is Jim­my Con­lon not, alas, Derek Run, or some­thing like that.

His boss, Shawn Maguire (Ed Har­ris), is old school enough not to want to get into bed with some boun­cy Alba­ni­ans in design­er shell­suits look­ing to bro­ker a major hero­in deal, much to the mur­der­ous cha­grin of his mani­ac son Dan­ny (Boyd Hol­brook). By strange quirk, Jimmy’s estranged son Mike (Joel Kin­na­man) observes Dan­ny while engaged in an unfor­tu­nate back-alley gun ram­page, and so it’s fam­i­ly vs fam­i­ly as Shawn throws every­thing at his old pal in the name of ter­ri­to­r­i­al pride. Nat­u­ral­ly, ruth­less employ­ment of a par­tic­u­lar set of skills help save the day.

While you could spend all day pick­ing holes in the plot and guf­faw­ing at the clichés, Run All Night is supe­ri­or ver­sion of these fac­to­ry-ready action movies that have become so syn­ony­mous with late-era Nee­son. It’s all down to Serra’s laud­ably brusque direc­tion and his jazz-drummer’s sense of tem­po. The mar­shalling of infor­ma­tion in the first 30 min­utes is astound­ing, as he sets up six char­ac­ters and var­i­ous old-guard enforcers (includ­ing Bruce McGill!) with the effi­cien­cy of a Marine assem­bling a hand-gun to order.

Per­haps Serra’s most valu­able trick is in mak­ing the mate­r­i­al seem more svelte and fresh than it per­haps is. He achieves this by splic­ing in impres­sive bul­let-time dig­i­tal tran­si­tions between scenes — these not only help to retain a grasp of which sto­ry thread we’re deal­ing with while nat­u­ral­ly dis­pens­ing of pace-dulling expo­si­tion shots, but offers a neat geo­graph­ic anchor in the city of New York, where this messy blood feud plays out. They also lend the film a cer­tain soci­o­log­i­cal heft, as a sud­den shift in focus to, say, a group of dis­en­gaged bystanders, empha­sise a our per­pet­u­al close­ness to vio­lence in urban met­ro­pol­i­tan locales.

A spec­tac­u­lar first half los­es some of its lus­tre as mat­ters take a turn for the con­ven­tion­al in the sec­ond. That Jim­my is a ser­i­al mur­der­er is han­dled with kid gloves, its ram­i­fi­ca­tions are deemed less impor­tant than him mak­ing due remon­stra­tions with his son pri­or to aton­ing for his sins. The film near­ly stretch­es to two hours, but would’ve like­ly made for a far more impact­ful 83 minutes.