TwitReview – Liam Neeson uses his “very particular set of skills” in ‘Run All Night’; suspenseful, lots of action, and a great story –  Neeson, Ed Harris, Common, and Joel Kinnaman. Grade: 4 out of 5!

Since 2008, Liam Neeson has become the go-to-action star for gritty, real-world style, action movies. Neeson’s style added to his character’s anger and angst really resonated with audiences allowing Taken to be a new success leading to more films of the same genre. Neeson has starred in the following real-world style gritty action movies:

• Taken
• Unkown
• Taken 2
• Non-Stop
• A Walk Among the Tombstones
• Taken 3
• Run All Night

All have had one common theme since the success of Taken…Neeson playing a character with “a special set of skills” that are used to help those who need him no matter the darkness that follows his character. And let’s be real here, his characters aren’t perfect as each one has had issues that seem to follow him around. In the Taken series it was the failure of his marriage, in Non-Stop it was the death of his child, and in Run All Night it is his past and drunkenness that follow him around.

Neeson plays Jimmy “The Gravedigger” Conlon, a hit-man for the Irish mob run by Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). Both have been friends since they were younger, Shawn grew up to run the mob while Jimmy was his muscle. Over the past few years Jimmy has fallen flat due to the death of his wife and the alienation to his son Mike (Joel Kinnaman). During this time, Shawn’s organization has grown but also moved into a more legit state of business, something that Shawn’s son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) doesn’t want to digest and understand. Danny managed to bring in a deal that could net over 2-million dollars by allowing drugs to slip through the inspection points at the port that Shawn’s men run. Wanting nothing to do with drugs, Shawn tells Danny to break the deal he made and cleanup his mess.

Danny executes his “mistake” and it happens to be in front of Michael. This leads Shawn asking Jimmy to talk to his son and keep him quiet. However Danny has other plans which results in Jimmy and Shawn crossing paths.

There are some touching moments where Jimmy tries to fix what he broke with his son and reconcile their relationship. Which is hard as both know of Jimmy’s past, the bad things he did, and the time he spent away from his family. Jimmy isn’t an evil man, he just did a lot of bad thing killing a few people. Those murders of course caught the attention of the NYPD Homicide Unit and one Detective Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio) who was never able to link Jimmy to any of these.

During the course of the night friendship and family fall apart while Jimmy learns whom his real family is.

Run All Night is rated R (the violence should have been the first clue) and directed by Jaume Colet-Serra whom Neeson has worked with before on Unkown and Non-Stop. With a run time just under two hours (114 minutes), Run All Night is a movie that will leave you at the edge of your seat.