Run All Night
2 Waffles!

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.