As bad business and loneliness is taking its toll on private detective Philip Marlowe, a beautiful blonde arrives and asks him to find her ex-lover, which proves to be just a small part in a bigger...
Ok, I don’t know what’s more baffling: seeing Liam Neeson stuck in a perpetual rut of mediocrity since his Taken days or the fact that the few times he does divert from his ‘particular set of skills’, it’s somehow more and less memorable than those films at the same time. Todays indictment of that bewildering notion is Marlowe, based on the Raymond Chandler novels.
A modern film noir hinted with flavors of classical cinema tweaked in the wrong place and time.
Steeped in the anachronisms of 1930s culture, the impeccable costume and high-end production values help the film look the part thanks to its predominantly stunning visuals; looking at this pre-war Los Angeles has this dreamlike quality that sports the setting and visual storytelling and the cinematography often supports that seamlessly. Also, the atmosphere has silvers of that P.I rudimentary stylistic authenticity from the old days. Neil Jordan’s directing is fine, I guess; he did the best he could with what was given but not much else is added to the overall experience behind the fundamentals. It's more drawn out and noisy than what we would have seen 80 years ago.
All of that would’ve been tolerable if the staging of the story and world it inhabits wasn’t so by the numbers and frustratingly clumsy…..among other things.
Now let’s make this clear: the plot isn’t as convoluted as others make it out to be: it’s the typical neo-noir film style of clipped conversations, a world-weary detective unafraid to use his fists, and glamourous but suspicious femme fatale leads. But it’s long-winded nature and execution makes following the narrative a little troublesome and that’s not even going into how it checks off every noir cliche and trope off the list. Both the structure and pacing of the film is very muddled, constantly hamstrung by exposition-heavy, dialogue-driven scenes that are stilted and awkward and the script is utterly milquetoast, slapped together in a manner that’s confusing at best and emotionally bereft at its worst. It paints itself as if it feels uncomfortable with itself.
Not to mention, Raymond Chandler’s plots were never designed to be neatly disentangled: it normally takes extensive trial and error and backtracking by design. But given this film was based on a book that wasn’t even made by Chandler, it’s a huge missed opportunity. As is, the actual mystery is begrudgingly simple and while it gives off the illusion of extensive trial and error to make you think like a detective, the anemic story has little intrigue, trivial stakes and STILL finds a way to NOT make any lick of sense.
We have a leisurely pace that eventually gets too bloated for its own good, the musical score barely stands out and the editing is poor, constantly cutting away and jumping both in location and plot, leaving the viewer with very little leeway to catch on to what’s going on. Even random characters, plot points, and action sequences pop in and out almost at random; said action sequences are poorly choreographed and diminishing and the characters themselves are straight up caricatures.
While the runtime is decent, that damn pacing had it plod on longer than it probably should’ve while rushing through scene to scene at the same time and hell, the acting falls flat too. Liam Neeson being miscast is already a massive hit to the film but it wouldn’t be that begrudgingly obvious if the rest of the cast didn’t struggle to develop chemistry with one another.
Me personally, I don’t wanna go so far as to say the movie does Philip Marlowe a disservice but neither does it successfully re-invent the character for the new generation. As for Liam’s 100th film, this was not an easy watch.
