Liam Neeson as detective Philip Marlowe in the film Marlowe.Photo Credit: Quim Vives/Courtesy of VVS Films
Marlowe
Directed by Neil Jordan
Written by William Monahan, based on the novel by John Banville
Starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger and Jessica Lange
Classification R; 110 minutes
Opens in theatres Feb. 15
Like a case gone cold, there is an overwhelming sense of hardboiled hopelessness to the new noir Marlowe. Marking the first onscreen appearance of Raymond Chandler’s P.I. in more than four decades, director Neil Jordan’s muddled thriller is a throwback that either cannot or refuses to appreciate just what it is throwing back to. Combine this fundamental confusion with a dull mystery, a stack of not-fun-but-still-hammy performances, budgetary issues that no amount of set dressing can hide, and one giant central miscast, and you have a detective movie so pulpy that it will make you choke.
Adapting John Banville’s 2014 novel The Black Eyed Blonde – a Marlowe tale authorized by the Chandler estate – prolific screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed, Body of Lies) has an ear for the sharp, detail-oriented dialogue that Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum were so smooth at delivering, just not the step-by-step plotting that Chandler had perfected. This is an especially large problem when a movie like Marlowe has to rely so heavily on the power of its twists and turns, given that everything else – cast, setting, soundtrack – feels culled from the coroner’s office.
Things start off innocently enough, with private eye Marlowe (Liam Neeson) approached by femme fatale Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) in 1930s Los Angeles. She’s an icy heiress looking for her ex-lover, and Marlowe is looking to keep himself busy, so it all works out – until the case trips into several shady corners of the underworld, with all manner of character actors popping by to cash an easy pay day for deploying increasingly curious accents (Alan Cumming is the prime offender as a Southern gangster, but Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Colm Meaney are just as guilty).
The mystery both comes together and falls apart at the same time, resulting in a head-scratching affair that cannot be saved by Jordan’s (likely budget-related) decision to recreate ‘30s L.A. in Barcelona, nor his efforts to coax his one-time Michael Collins star Neeson out of a lumbering, slumbering performance. The actor has the square jaw and steady gaze to play Marlowe like an ace, but he seems to only come alive when presented with the opportunity to slug some decades-younger bad hombres, Taken-style. (In the battle of the onscreen Marlowe’s, Neeson falls just above Elliott Gould, but below Powers Boothe.)
By the time that Danny Huston arrives playing an uber-Huston archetype – the shady strings-puller who YELLS A LOT – it is clear that Marlowe has little new to offer the genre, and is instead playing some kind of strange tick-the-boxes international-sales play. You cannot help but watch the film and wonder if Jordan – so far removed from his Crying Game era, or even the high but lazy camp of 2018′s Greta – ever contemplated slapping an Alan Smithee on the credits. But as Chandler writes, “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
Barry Hertz