Marlowe (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ½

Marlowe (2022) – N. Jordan

As a film noir aficionado, I just couldn’t ignore this latest attempt to revive the genre, especially as it is set in the true noir period (1940s/50s), rather than positioned as a modern day neo-noir (although some of these can be brilliant). Liam Neeson is the latest to don the (gum)shoes of Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private detective protagonist of Raymond Chandler’s best works (The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodbye), succeeding Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, and more recently James Garner, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum. Indeed, Neeson’s portrayal most resembles that of Mitchum who played Marlowe in a pair of 1970s reboots as an older, tired version of the private eye, nearly washed up, and not the wry and witty smart-arse of Bogart or Powell. This might be too generous to Neeson, however, and it might be more accurate to say that he is miscast here. Neil Jordan’s film also resembles those Mitchum vehicles (directed by Dick Richards) by playing things fairly straight (with only a few spare jokes about Christopher Marlowe that might make you hope for a pastiche). But alas what began promisingly as an homage to a treasured genre soon settled into the turgid form of the made-for-TV movie (notwithstanding the presence of Jessica Lange, Diane Kruger, Alan Cumming and especially Danny Huston who drift in and out like so many well-paid guest stars), finally imploding in a corner while viewers ponder what they came here for.