It lacks the zip Scott Frank's best screenplays (then again Scott's best screenplays are adaptations of Elmore Leonard's books) but the writer's first directorial outing since 2007's The Lookout is a solid thriller.
Liam Neeson plays a former New York cop with a drinking problem who has reinvented himself as a private detective. He's asked to help drug trafficker Dan Stevens retrieve his wife from two ruthless kidnappers (Harbour and Adam David Thompson) who are demanding serious money. After jumping through hoops to deliver the ransom, the wife is indeed returned... chopped into pieces and packed into the trunk of a car. Now Stevens wants Neeson to hunt down and kill those responsible but there's evidence that these kidnappers are pros and this isn't their first time...
In yet another adaptation (this time it's Lawrence Block's novel) Scott Frank never wants the audience to doubt who the good guy is – Neeson, obvs - but the waters are muddied somewhat. Neeson's cop was not only a hard drinker while on duty, a tendency that led to a tragic incident that ended in his dismissal, but he was also corrupt: "It would be impossible to support my family without." A brave approach that extends to Stevens's one-note drug trafficker too, with Scott having him recline on his expensive couch reading Nabokov (!).
The writer-director gives the game away too early, however, letting the audience in on who the kidnappers are and what makes them tick. But Frank does swap mystery for what is the film's finest scene: David Harbour's deadened eyes as watches his next victim, a teenage girl, walk in slow motion past his van. The look on his face, full of love and want, is a creepy insight into a sociopath's mind.
Where the story grinds to a halt is a subplot involving a tough-talking homeless vegetarian teen (Bradley), who fancies himself as a junior private detective, shadowing Neeson as he snoops about, and the story forgets about Stevens for vast chunks of the second act before ushering him back into the fray for dubious reasons. Waiting for the pre-millennium setting to warrant its inclusion is distracting too.
But Neeson does the job asked of him and Stevens does what he can with the time he has, but it's Harbour, doing his best Malkovich, that will stick in the memory.