At this point, it’s fair to say that Liam Neeson is the hardest-working man in showbiz. It’s not even close.
Since 2008’s Taken, Neeson has 38 acting credits to his name. Granted, a few of these are for voiceover work and one-off television episodes. Still: That’s a substantial body of work.
Some of it is for big-budget franchises—aborted franchises, in some cases, such as Battleship or The A-Team, as well as more successful ones, such as Clash of the Titans. The other broad category of Neeson’s output could be charitably described as Taken knockoffs. In them, Neeson generally plays a broken-down father figure—frequently, though not exclusively, suffering from alcoholism—who must find his inner resolve in order to protect someone.
In addition to the Taken trilogy, we’ve got Unknown (Taken with amnesia), The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), and now Run All Night (Taken with a son instead of a daughter).
In Run All Night, Neeson plays a broken-down mob hit man named Jimmy Conlon. As the action opens, Jimmy’s passed out in the bar owned by his best friend and local mob boss, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). Jimmy needs a few bucks to get his heater fixed and Shawn had told him to get the cash from his son, Danny (Boyd Holbrook).
Danny wants to get the family involved with the drug business, bringing a pair of Albanian associates to his dad in order to get clearance at the local shipyard. Shawn, who lived through the drug booms of the 70s and 80s and saw the damage it did to his friends and family involved in the trade, declines. This puts Danny in a tough spot, seeing as how the Albanians paid him off to make the deal with his dad.
So Danny kills the Albanians, who are, conveniently, driven to his house by Conlon’s estranged son, Mike. When Mike witnesses the killing, Danny decides to kill Mike. Jimmy saves Mike by killing Danny. Meaning that Shawn now needs to kill Mike and Jimmy—or Jimmy needs to kill Shawn to keep Mike and his family safe.
In other words, everyone needs to kill everyone else in order for everyone to be safe.
Run All Night is more or less competently made, but at almost two hours long it drags a bit. I couldn’t help but think, on several occasions, "Well, this is okay, but it’s no John Wick." Attempting to get people emotionally invested in the cardboard cutouts that populate Run All Night is a waste of time and energy.
It also doesn’t help that the movie’s most interesting character, Shawn, is not its lead. Harris’ portrayal of the disillusioned mob boss—a gangster willing to turn down millions because he doesn’t want to get involved with the drug trade, a father disappointed to see his spoiled son making dangerous life decisions, a husband forced to tell his wife that their only boy got put in the ground by his oldest friend—is a real highlight of Run All Night. Were this movie told from Shawn’s point of view, it would make for a far more interesting picture.
Instead, Run All Night is a lesser iteration of late-model Neeson. Entertaining enough, but not much else.