Video: "Run All Night"

"Run All Night" is about just that: a single dark night over the course of which which lives will be lost, old debts repaid, stained honor redeemed and many bullets will fly. It's the rare movie where the quiet, talkie parts are more interesting than the action mayhem.

Liam Neeson plays Jimmy "Gravedigger" Conlon, a once-legendary mob hitman who has devolved into a pitiable drunk. His old partners in crime have gone legit, he's become a joke in the working-class dives he frequents, and his own son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) wants nothing to do with him.

But through a series of unfortunate events, Jimmy saves Michael's life by killing the son of his gangster friend, Shawn, who's played by Ed Harris. Jimmy offers to make good by giving his own life in exchange, but Shawn is an old-school type who wants an eye to match the one he's lost.

The rest of the movie is essentially one long chase, with various mob toughs and cops out to get Jimmy and Michael. Actor/rapper Common turning up as a younger, meticulous assassin who acts as counterpoint to Jimmy's guts-and-instincts M.O. Vincent D'Onofrio plays the police detective who's wanted to see Jimmy in cuffs for years, but decides he can't be abandoned to Shawn's (lack of) mercies.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra gets a little too caught up in fancy filmmaking techniques -- slo-mo "bullet time" and jumpy editing. Some of the action sequences just plain go on too long, turning into an indistinguishable mashup of guns blazing and fists flying.

The slower character scenes have weight and punch, however. Harris and Neeson are terrific in their scenes together, two men who chose the way of the gun long ago, fully knowing it might lead to a night like this one.

It's a well-made movie that probably could've been a better one.

Extra features are just so-so. The DVD comes only with a handful of deleted scenes. Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add two making-of featurettes. One focuses on the production, while the other is about Neeson's resurgence as a long-tooth action star.

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Review: "Run All Night"

"Run All Night" is a revenge action movie that is at its best when the bullets aren't flying. Liam Neeson has become the patron saint of this genre now: old guys who have to roust themselves out of a torpor for One Last Job. But he's still got the goods, as a bunch of younger guys who underestimate him are soon to discover.

I really admired the setup for this story. Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously directed Neeson in "Unknown" and "Non-Stop," and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby ("Out of the Furnace") give us a compelling world that's both familiar and new, with cops and gangsters, sons and fathers, loyalty to old friends battling with familial devotion.

It's the sort of movie where the broke-down drunk with a dark past redeems himself over the course of one night.

Neeson is Jimmy Conlon, a legendary hitman for New York mobster Shawn Maguire, who's played by Ed Harris. They used to be on the front pages all the time, mostly for outfoxing the law, but now the years have rolled on, unkindly. Shawn has become a legitimate businessman -- mostly, anyway -- and their old haunts are getting turned into Applebees.

And Jimmy, once nicknamed "Gravedigger," the guy others stepped off from when he walked into the bar, has become the pitiful rummy they laugh at.

One early scene is more or less lifted straight out of "The Godfather," with Shawn's kid Danny (Boyd Holbrook) demonstrating what a loose cannon he is. Through a convoluted bit of exposition, Jimmy's own son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) gets caught in the middle of some intrigue, witnesses Danny doing some bad things, so Danny decides he's got to protect himself. Long story short, Danny winds up dead by Jimmy's hand.

It's telling that within seconds of gunning down his best friend's kid, Jimmy's first act is to call Shawn and tell him the news, without preamble. That's who he is. There is no hesitation or dissembling with him. He offers his own life in exchange for his son's. But Shawn is old school, and needs for others to suffer in order to quench his own.

The rest of the movie turns into one long big chase scene, with Jimmy and Michael, who have long been estranged for obvious reasons, trying to keep each other alive. A bunch of mob goons are after them, along with the police, a goodly portion of whom are on Shawn's payroll. The only cop Jimmy is able to trust is Detective Harding (Vincent D'Onofrio), who despises him for beating the rap so long.

This stuff is engaging enough, though it eventually becomes an indistinguishable mix of running, gunfire and beefy guys grappling with each other. Rapper/actor Common turns up as an icy assassin brought in to clean things up. He uses a fancy gun rig, night vision lenses and other modern gear, acting as Jimmy's latter-day doppelganger.

I liked a lot about "Run All Night" while still wishing it had found a better way to balance its various story elements. The scenes with Neeson and Harris facing off with each other are the finest, two grizzled partners in crime who can't scrub off the sins of the past.

But they end up getting buried in all the bang-bang scenes -- unnecessarily buttressed with "bullet time" CG and topsy-turvy editing. The weighty business about honor and debts is there, but it's grace notes and echoes of a superior movie. It's still a rousing flick, but boy, shoulda coulda.

Reeling Backward: "Mystic Pizza" (1988)

A few weeks ago I featured "Steel Magnolias" in this space as an example of a good chick flick. It made me curious to see another early Julia Roberts movie I'd heard good things about, 1988's "Mystic Pizza." I wouldn't call it a bad chick flick, but it's closer to the cliche of a flick aimed exclusively at a female audience.

To put it bluntly, "Mystic Pizza" is more or less a movie version of a soap opera, layered in with some quirky humor and gigantic '80s hair. Roberts has a couple of moments in the film where her 'do seems as tall as her entire head. There are other moments that distant memories of being stuck home sick as a kid with the warbling music of "Days of Our Lives" in the background were brought to the fore.

Roberts, Lili Taylor and Annabeth Gish were all 20-ish starlets just starting out, and the main enjoyment to be had in the movie is watching them emerge as actresses. Roberts plays Daisy, the bad girl offspring of a family of fisherman in the seaside town of Mystic, Conn. Gish is her goody sister Kat, who's saving money to attend Yale. Taylor is Jojo, the scrappy friend who gets cold feet at her wedding in the film's opening scene -- actually, she gets knocked cold when she passes out on the altar.

All three work at the Mystic Pizza restaurant, a downscale place that just happens to have the best pizza around. The proprietor, Leona (Conchata Ferrell), guards her recipe like nuclear missile codes, and vows to pass it on only after retiring.

This is the sort of movie in which a local dining critic is watched dispensing his views on the restaurant's television, and we just know it's inevitable that he'll show up at the Mystic.

The film's title, by the way, was based on a shop screenwriter Amy Holden Jones saw in the real Mystic, and she made up a story around it. Inevitably, the restaurant has become a tourist attraction -- though who knows if the pizza is as good as Leona's.

Anyway, all three girls juggle relationships during the fateful fall in which the story takes place. Jojo resists her fiance's attempts to get her to go through with the marriage. At one point, Bill even refuses sex until they are married. Bill is played by Vincent D'Onofrio, incredibly lean and in blue-collar hunk mode. Jojo confesses that even the sight of his manly wrists drives her into a sexual frenzy.

Daisy's guy is Charles, scion of a local rich family. He has one of those great introduction scenes where he and his preppy friends waltz into a rough fishermen's bar and start slinging money around for drinks and bets. Daisy catches his eye, and the next day he presumptuously shows up at her house, informing Daisy's mother that they have a date. Beats having to ask.

The fiery Daisy enjoys the attention, but is seasoned enough to know Charles probably just wants a fling with a townie. In one of the big comedic scenes, she spots him at a local restaurant with another woman, and dumps a pickup truck full of bait fish into his red Porsche. Of course, the other woman turns out to be his sister.

Kat's fling is with the father of the little girl she's hired to babysit. Tim's wife is away for a few months. He's an architect, about 30 and a fellow Yaley, and soon the good-hearted Kat is casting moony eyes at him. We know it's doomed before things even start, but in this sort of movie Kat is obliged to find that out for herself.

Matt Damon makes a very brief cameo in a dinner scene as Charles' younger brother. "Hey Mom, do you want my green stuff?" is his only line. It was his first role, and four years later he would make a bigger impression in "School Ties," a film like this one that gathers a lot of undiscovered talent in one place.

"Mystic Pizza" was directed by Donald Petrie, and he's still around making similar middlebrow stuff with a romantic comedy bent -- "How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days," "My Life in Ruins," etc.

2.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Whole Wide World"

I've always admired people who try something new late in life. One of personal favorite stories I've written for newspapers was a piece I did on people who became artists in their 30s, 40s and even beyond.

Frank McCourt wrote his first book, "Angela's Ashes," in his mid-60s. Norman MacLean published "A River Runs Through it" at age 75. Perhaps it's not happenstance that they were both autobiographical works, written by people with long teaching careers. And both were made into movies.

"The Whole Wide World" is another in that vein. The 1996 film is based on a memoir, "One Who Walked Alone," written by Novalyne Price Ellis in the 1980s about her friendship and brief romance with Robert E. Howard in the 1930s.

If Howard's name doesn't ring a bell, I'm not surprised. He's one of the most famous authors whom nobody knows.

Howard was a pulp fiction writer whose work mostly appeared in magazines and cheap paperback compilations. During his short life he wrote most every type of fiction -- dramas, Westerns, sports stories, you name it. But he's best known for his work in the nascent sword-and-sorcery genre. He created Conan the Barbarian, whose mighty legs strode the literary and cinematic worlds.

Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger were mostly unknown youngsters back in 1996, although D'Onofrio had a few more high-profile roles ("Full Metal Jacket," "Ed Wood") under his belt than she did, pre-"Jerry Maguire."

D'Onofrio is known to be a scenery-chewing performer, but it fits for this outsized role as a man who lived (and died) by his own rules. Howard rejected conformity and eschewed middle-American values -- and yet he lived with his parents his entire life, and doted on his mother (Ann Wedgeworth).

There's a great scene where Novalyne sees Bob Howard in town with his mother, and you can see the envy in her eyes as she witnesses how considerate and gentlemanly he is around his mother -- exactly unlike the brooding, boasting figure he strikes during their on-again, off-again dating.

One of the most interesting things about the portrayal of Howard is that he wrote his lusty, blood-spattered Conan stories banging away at his typewriter while yelling his prose out loud, like a mad shaman spinning tales of yore. In another scene, Novalyne asks Bob to describe Conan, and he pulls the car over, jumps out in front of a cornfield and proceeds to deliver a thunderous, passionate rendering of an anti-hero who "takes it from no one."

Having read all of Howard's Conan books and knowing a little about him, it's clear that the author saw himself in these stories -- or at least how would like to have been. Of course, it's easier to be an iconoclast when you're swinging a sword against monsters, instead of a chubby outcast in Depression-era Texas.

Directed by Dan Ireland from a script by Michael Scott Myers, "The Whole Wide World" starts out as a mesmerizing portrait of Robert E. Howard that slowly loses steam as the movie's focus shifts over to Novalyne. Part of that reflects the historical record -- Howard and Price never could keep any kind of momentum going in their romance, and they grew farther apart the nearer his death grew.

(I should point out his suicide at age 30 had nothing to do with losing her. Upon hearing that his mother, who had long been in decline with tuberculosis, would never wake again, he walked out to his car and shot himself. He lived a few more hours, and his mother died the next day.)

But the bigger challenge is that making a movie about an amazing, bigger-than-life personality is much easier to do than one about the person who was inspired by them. The half-crazy artist is always going to be more interesting than the ordinary friend or relative who had to put up with them. They don't make movies centering on Vincent Van Gogh's brother or Shakespeare's wife.

3 stars