Ever since the unexpected worldwide success of Taken back in 2008 reinvented him as a surprise action hero, Liam Neeson has been our cinematic groundhog—every year, seemingly without fail, he pops up during the early part of the year with increasingly anonymous genre exercises that serve to remind us all that the winter multiplex doldrums will continue for a few more weeks. Most of those films have been forgettable at best but to give this year’s entry, Marlowe, some credit, it does appear that more effort has gone into it than usual. This time around, he is working with a celebrated filmmaker in Neil Jordan and a more-than-decent supporting cast and is portraying one of the most iconic characters in all of 20th-century American fiction. If the film ultimately doesn’t quite succeed—and it doesn’t—at least Neeson and his collaborators seem to be reasonably invested in things this time around.
The character in question is Philip Marlowe, the legendarily laconic private detective creation of Raymond Chandler who has been brought to the screen numerous times over the years—most famously by Humphrey Bogart in the Howard Hawks classic The Big Sleep (1946), most infamously by Elliot Gould in Robert Altman’s brilliantly subversive classic The Long Goodbye (1973) and most soulfully by Robert Mitchum in the should-have-been-a-classic Farewell, My Lovely (1975). On paper, Neeson may not quite be the ideal candidate for the role—at 70, he is by far the oldest actor to play the part and details of his background have been reconceived in order to better explain his Irishness—but he clearly takes to the part and invests his performance with more energy than he has demonstrated in a while. He may not quite measure up to the previous actors to fill Marlowe’s gumshoes—not even Gould, whose then-bewildering presence feels more iconic with each passing year—but he does the part justice and shakes the torpor that has weighed down many of his recent punch-and-shoot performances.
This time around, the year is 1939 and Marlowe is working as a private eye in Los Angeles and as the story begins, a new client arrives at his office with a case. She is Clare (Diane Kruger), a poor little rich girl who wants Marlowe’s help in tracking down the missing Nico (Francois Arnaud), who works in the props department of a movie studio and is also her lover. After the customary banter, Marlowe takes the case but he has barely begun when he learns that Nico is dead, his head crushed after being run over by a car just outside of an exclusive club catering to the town’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Since we are barely 20 minutes into the film at this point and since it is highly unlikely that the rest of the film is going to consist of Marlowe filling out paperwork, it is fairly obvious that things are not entirely what they seem and he is compelled to push on anyway. This pursuit of the truth leads him from the corridors—okay, cabanas—of power in Los Angeles to its seedy, seamy underbelly and entails greed, drugs, sex, corruption and additional murders and finds him crossing paths with an array of colorful characters, including Jessica Lange as Clare’s sinister mother, Danny Huston and Alan Cumming as a couple of highly connected people who want him to go away, one way or another, Ian Hart and Colm Meany as a couple of old pals from Marlowe’s days as a cop and Adele Akinnuoye-Agbaje as a chauffeur who proves to be quite resourceful in other areas as well.
Marking his first time behind the camera since 2018’s agreeably sleazy psycho-thriller Greta, Jordan moves things along at an agreeably stylish clip and even though you never quite get the feel that you are actually in Los Angeles at any given point (the film was actually shot in Dublin and Spain), it still looks pretty good. He is clearly having a good time and so does the supporting cast that Neeson encounters along the way. The best of the bunch is Lange, who doesn’t really have a lot to do, I suppose, but who cheerfully milks her part for all of its campy potential. The on-screen chemistry that she demonstrated with Neeson back when they co-starred in Rob Roy is still undeniably there and their scenes together are the highlights of the film, so much so that most viewers will wish that there had been more of them.
The problem with the film is that the mystery at its center ultimately isn’t worth a hill of beans. Marlowe is based not on an actual Chandler work but on The Black-Eyed Blonde, a 2014 novel by Benjamin Black that was authorized by the Chandler estate and while screenwriter William Monahan tries to emulate the twisty developments and tart dialogue that Chandler was so good at, the result is little more than a pastiche that at times feels more like a retread of Chinatown than a continuation of Chandler’s legacy. The narrative just plods along but always keeps us at enough of a distance that it makes it difficult for us to connect with what is going on at any given point. The ending is especially disappointing as it gets bogged down to such an extent that it become nearly impossible to entirely understand who did what and why. I’m not talking about the kind of delicious twistiness that The Big Sleep reveled in—this is the kind where you find yourself too confused to fully get what is going on and ultimately too bored to want to go back and piece it all together.
As I said, Marlowe is ultimately not a completely satisfying moviegoing experience, unless you were specifically seeking out this generation’s Hammett. Still, it has its moments here and there and it is clearly a few steps up from Neeson’s recent string of projects, most of which have felt like projects that the late Charles Bronson might have rejected back in the day for being too flimsily constructed. Most of the ingredients for a decent film are here, with the unfortunate exception of a satisfactory screenplay, and I can see how they could all be put in the service of a decent movie. Who knows—perhaps if Marlowe makes enough money at the box-office (though the decision to open it opposite the first sure-fire blockbuster of 2023 and backed with a decidedly lackluster ad campaign suggests that probably won’t be happening), everyone involved can reunite for another film that will hopefully prove to be more worthy of both the character of Philip Marlowe and the actor portraying him.