Film Review: "Run All Night" (2015).

"No sin goes unpunished" in Run All Night. This action thriller film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and written by Brad Ingelsby. Brooklyn mobster and prolific hit man Jimmy Conlon, once known as The Gravedigger, has seen better days. Longtime best friend of mob boss Shawn Maguire, Jimmy, now fifty-five, is haunted by the sins of his past—as well as a dogged police detective who’s been one step behind Jimmy for thirty years. Lately, it seems Jimmy’s only solace can be found at the bottom of a whiskey glass. But when Jimmy’s estranged son, Mike, becomes a target, Jimmy must make a choice between the crime family he chose and the real family he abandoned long ago. With Mike on the run, Jimmy’s only penance for his past mistakes may be to keep his son from the same fate Jimmy is certain he’ll face himself…at the wrong end of a gun. Now, with nowhere safe to turn, Jimmy just has one night to figure out exactly where his loyalties lie and to see if he can finally make things right.

In January 2012, Warner Bros. acquired Ingelsby's script The All-Nighter for a six-figure sum. In November, Collet-Serra was hired to direct and the title was changed to Run All Night. By early October 2013, Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Vincent D'Onofrio, Joel Kinnaman, Common, Boyd Holbrook, Bruce McGill, Genesis Rodriguez and Holt McCallany were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and took place throughout New York.

The film stars Neeson, Harris, D'Onofrio, Kinnaman, Common, Holbrook, McGill, Rodriguez and McCallany. Casting Neeson as a heavy is no mistake here, and though the gamble is not entirely successful it's a fine experiment. It's Harris who really stands out. The man still has remarkable presence. Neeson and Harris are the personification of anguish and torn loyalty in a gripping, violent film that is part character study and part cat-and-mouse chase with classic western embellishments.

Gangsters. Fathers. Sons. Honor. The film is all this and more, perhaps too perfect or too calculated, but with great cinema in it. So is the film still a must-see? No question. But it's tough to fuss about it much when a picture is this fussy. What makes the movie pay off is moving pictures of real action and of intimate scenes between father and son that are all the more moving for being understated. The film is so jumbled and poseurish that you're less likely to wonder, How did the creators of Unknown and Non-Stop sink this low? The film is a self-regarding, humorless film smitten with its own gravitas. It's so motionless it becomes a slide show about how to shoot a gangster film. For all its hard-boiled pretensions, The film becomes a cloying look at father-son relations in modern New York. The story, so alive and idiosyncratic in its characterizations and periphery, is all hollow and cautious at the center. Collet-Serra's washed-up gangster yarn is filled with overused, pretentious attempts at style and immature notions of death, fatherhood, and humanity.

Simon says Run All Night receives:

Also, see my review for Non-Stop.