Marlowe (2022) Unlike other carping critics, I've no problem with Liam Neeson following the well trod career path of Sir Michael Caine.....
Like Caine, Neeson loves to keep making films and takes just about anything that comes his way.......usually in the genre Neeson now exclusively carved out for himself......that of 'the old guy workin' stiff whom everybody takes for granted until he's forced to reveal he's an ass-kicking force-to-be-reckoned-with.."
'Marlowe' incorporates Neeson's go-to genre into its main agenda......re-creating and re-inventing 1940's wisecracking Private Eye noir......an idea that always gets at least 2 or 3 attempts every decade for the last 50 years.......
Some filmmakers make an all out effort to meticulously carbon-copy the genre.....involving the not inexpensive task to reproducing the 1940's era in all its glory,....the cars, the clothes, the houses, the attitudes, the snappy patter of tough P.I.s and sultry dames.
More daring filmmakers choose to bend the genre to their will, replanting it into the current zeitgeist and deploying all its now cliche tropes as weapons of satire on the way we live now.....(the prime example of this, of course.....Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye". )
Director and co-screenwriter Neil Jordan wants its every which way in "Marlow". He peppers the film's dialogue with so many arch, hip zingers, the actors sound like they're hurling opaque non-sequiturs at each other., And he so studiously mimics the noir visuals with, fussy, academic determination, the film looks like a Museum of Natural History diorama....reproducing familiar Private Eye scenes the same way museums do for stuffed lions and tigers in their natural habitats...
And the resulting film is every bit as lifeless, stillborn and frozen in time as a diorama.
From beginning to end, the film maintains its barely tolerable aura of dullness, even when it sends the clearly elderly Neeson into punch-ups with assorted thugs. In the familiar supporting cast, only Jessica Lange, as a snarky rich L.A. grande dame does her best to liven things up a little, But she's up against a solid wall of monotone set by director Jordan.
A worthless waste of time and I'm exhausted even talking about it. Enough's enough. Zero stars (0)......make believe it never happened. I'm pretty sure that's what Neeson's done already.....
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