Rebekah Marin

Liberal Arts Major with a concentration in English

After only googling the title of the film and reading the short synopsis I decided that going to see “A Walk Among the Tombstones” would add a little excitement to my Saturday night. I realized a little excitement was an understatement after watching a shootout and a woman crying out of what I could only peg to be fear and pain. Liam Neeson stars as former cop, and now private detective, Matt Scudder in this thriller.

I know what you’re thinking, it sounds an awful lot like another “Taken” film, but it was so much more than that. In this film Scudder is hired by a drug dealer to go after the men who killed his wife. The story developed into a complex network of the abductions of women that all had connections to drug dealers. As Scudder begins to search for the men responsible for killing these women I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of those women.

The killers stalked women like prey until they were sure they could get away without being seen and for all but one victim, that was the beginning of the end of their lives. Watching the women on screen struggle as they were mentally and physically abused was incredibly heart wrenching and terrifying. Countless times I found myself gripping at my sides averting my eyes when certain scenes became a little too gruesome for my weak stomach to handle.
If you’re beginning to feel a little uneasy just reading this, hold on, it gets better I promise. While attempting to track down more information about the killers Scudder finds himself befriending a young boy by the name of T.J. who he, somewhat reluctantly, takes under his wing. As a young African American boy living on the streets he has a lot to learn from Scudder, and even more to fear, when he experiences a few close calls. Scudder and TJ’s relationship develops into a heartwarming father-son style relationship while Scudder is careful to keep TJ just distant enough to stay out of harms way.

Of course as in most of his movies, Neeson becomes the hero of the story, saving a drug dealer’s daughter from the killer’s before it’s too late and bestowing upon them the consequences they deserve. I’m not sure if it was Neeson’s role or the typical good guy/bad guy dynamics including tense phone calls and money drop-off’s that made this film predictable. But there was definitely something causing the element of surprise to diminish when characters found pieces of their loved one’s bodies scattered in ponds and trunks of cars. However overall it was an effectively gut wrenching, seat grabbing, heart racing-filled two hours of my life that left me practically speechless at the end.