Run
All Night
What
if we just run until midnight? 3 AM?
Liam Neeson stars as Jimmy Conlon – a mafia hitman in a very
complicated and precarious situation. His estranged son, Mike (Joel
Kinnaman), is a decent, hardworking guy who drives a limo to make a
living. One night, Mike is the witness to a murder committed by Danny
(Boyd Holbrook), whose father is Jimmy’s best friend and mafia
boss, Shawn (Ed Harris). Stick with me because here comes the
complicated part.
Danny decides he needs to get rid of the witness, but Jimmy steps in
and saves Mike’s life by killing Danny. Now, Shawn wants revenge,
and he has sent every crooked cop, thug and hired hitman he knows to
wipe out Jimmy and Mike (And, that is when Mike IS TAKEN!!!!!
That’s not a joke. MIKE IS TAKEN and Liam Neeson has to issue
some threats while in a conversation on the telephone. It’s his
move, now)
Can Jimmy save Mike and his family from Shawn’s wrath?
Run All Night was very close to being a good
movie, but director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer Brad Ingelsby try too
hard to make it about more than what it needs to be.
When we are focused on the action and the running away, Run All
Night is a taught action movie. Collet-Serra is very good at
filming the big chase scenes, gun fights and fisticuffs with tension,
thrills and excitement. You can’t do very much with these scenes
that could be called original, but Collet-Serra sticks to the basics,
which works just fine.
Then, we learn this script does not have the endurance to run all
night. Ingelsby tries to add some depth, which makes Run All Night
start to slow down like an inexperienced marathoner trying to tackle a
hill at Mile 12.
Ingelsby attempts to flesh out the characters by including some details
about the strained Father and Son relationship between Jimmy and Mike,
which is fine in small doses, but he doesn’t give them the
dialogue to make it meaningful when it becomes the focus of a scene.
Instead, you realize these are bathroom break moments.
Even worse, the story drags and drags as we see Jimmy struggling with
the truth about his past, confronting other family members and his
almost pointless exchanges with Shawn (it’s fun to see Neeson and
Harris face off, but you can cut these scenes without much impact on
the overall plot, and they raise questions about logic).
All of this folderol slows the movie’s pace, and makes it drag on
far too long to the inevitable conclusion, especially in the last
couple of scenes, when everyone in the audience knows what is going to
happen and just wants to get it over with, so we can go home and enjoy
the rest of our lives.
Run
All Night is rated R for strong violence,
language including sexual references, and some drug use.
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