Run All Night (2015)

Jaume Collet-Serra's Run All Night arrives as the third collaboration between the director and Liam Neeson, and it operates in the well-worn register of the aging enforcer who has one bad night to redeem a lifetime of bad decisions. Neeson plays Jimmy Conlon, an Irish mob hitman gone to seed, who shoots the son of his oldest friend to save the son he abandoned, then spends the remaining hours of darkness trying to keep everyone alive. The plot is a blood feud, plainly stated, and the film has no interest in dressing it up. Ed Harris glowers. Joel Kinnaman broods. A great deal of running occurs.

For those of us who catalogue the cultural temperature of the modern release slate, this is a curiously blank specimen. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Common appearing as a contract killer and Genesis Rodriguez as the protagonist's daughter-in-law, both functional roles the film never pauses to examine. That is the extent of its demographic ambition, and it is offered without ceremony. Women exist here as wives, daughters and grieving mothers at the edges of a story that belongs entirely to men settling accounts. No environmental anxiety intrudes. No critique of capital surfaces, despite a plot that turns on heroin distribution. No character is diagnosed, affirmed, or invited to speak a truth about their identity. The film simply wants to show a tired man with a gun.

This is not a failing, strictly speaking. It is a genre picture, assembled with competence and a certain grim momentum, and it delivers the goods its audience came for. But the sommelier in me notes the absence of any vintage characteristics at all. There is no message, no instruction, no sermon. Just Neeson, a list of names, and the sound of a family trying, too late, to be a family. We drink it and move on. The cellar remains unmoved.