REVIEW: Run All Night (2015) Blu-Ray

So how is Liam Neeson’s hard man renaissance holding up?  There have been a string of manly movies post-Taken, not all of them have been great.  One that came out recently was Run All Night, unremarkable, but decent.  If you like gangster thrillers, Liam Neeson and Ed Harris, I’d recommend you hunt it down.  Now comes the Blu-Ray release, which isn’t in itself completely mind blowing but again, decent enough if only for the strong picture and inclusion of deleted material.  Run All Night deserves to be checked out.

Liam Neeson is Jimmy ‘The Gravedigger’ Conlon, a retired wino mobster who has earned his nickname by killing more in New York than Chairman Mao stiffed in East Asia.  Neeson’s best friend is mob boss Shawn Maguire, played by Harris.  After Maguire’s son gets himself killed by threatening Neeson’s son, Mike Conlon (Joel Kinnaman), Maguire senior sends out half the killers in the east coast to kill both Conlons.  Throw some corrupt cops into the mix and Conlon’s have little choice but to ‘run’.  Or kill.

This movie will cater to those who liked Out of the Furnace or Cold in July.  But it can’t quite match the tension of Furnace or icy brutality of July.  My main complaints with this movie… firstly there’s a Terminator-like assassin, with definite nods to Terminator 1 & 2, sent out to take down Neeson and Kinnaman.  That whole part of the story makes the movie sail dangerously close to action stupidity rather than mature, astute mobster flick.  It hurts the ending especially.  Second, Joel Kinnaman to me is kind of a wooden actor and that kind of thing might have fit for RoboCop, a dead cyborg/robot, but I expected more range from an actor cast alongside the likes of Neeson and Harris here.  Thankfully, those two save and make the movie.

This movie was dark as hell when it was released in theatres.  Most of it is set at night (obviously, hence the name) so murky shadows are abound.  That type of contrast can often catch out a Blu-Ray transfer, but not this one.  The depth and intention of the cinematography are intact and the film looks immersive.  There is half an hour of extras with this release.  Two small making of featurettes and more impressively, sixteen minutes of deleted scenes.  So if you like the movie itself, there’s a good transfer, good deleted material and a clear and thumpish DTS 5.1 audio track, but the cast and crew are less interested in speaking about the movie.