Run All Night

Though it takes place in the 21st Century, "Run All Night" evokes the gritty, gangster's paradise of New York in the 1970s. With its macho nostalgia and condensed, relentless pacing, this Liam Neeson shoot-em-up turns out to be an admirable little gangster film.

Jimmy Conlon (Neeson) and Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) are old-school gangsters and best friends who've let go of their old ways and held on to a heap of regrets. Each of them has a son who is unhappy with him: Conlon's son Mike (Joel Kinnaman) is ashamed of the thug and the drunk who spawned him and aspires to be a man of integrity, while Maguire's son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) expects his father to open doors into the criminal world, a place that the patriarch has sworn off.

When the law-abiding Mike witnesses Danny murdering a drug lord, Danny attempts to cover his tracks. But Conlon saves his boy by killing his best friend's son, and this opens the floodgates of mafia vengeance, hired assassins (Common) and police pursuits (the detective played by Vincent D'Onofrio), which will run all night until the sins of the fathers can somehow become paternal redemption.

This is the third collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra ("Unknown," "Non-Stop") and they've got the action sequences and the quick-pacing down pat. Location shooting throughout the greater Manhattan area gives this film a definitive atmosphere and integrity. But Collet-Serra is much better at suspense than he is with drama: intimate conversations are stilted and some dramatic scenes (that could be marvelous acting moments, like a small scene with the uncredited Nick Nolte) suffer from over editing. Quick, unnecessary cuts attempt to impose intensity onto the performance.

Special feature in this Blu-ray Combo Pack include a couple of roughly 10-minute long featurettes and deleted scenes. "Shoot All Night" is a behind the scenes look at how the film was made, whereas "Action All Night" concentrates on Neeson as the other actors talk about working with him.

"Run All Night"
Blu-ray Combo Pack
Rated: R / 114 minutes
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