As the title suggests, Run All Night, which was written by Brad Ingelsby (Out of the Furnace), takes place over the course of one night, as Jimmy tries to protect his son Mike (Joel Kinnaman), a straight-arrow husband and father, from his former employer and best friend, an organized crime boss named Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). Shawn’s son, a no-goodnik named Danny (Boyd Holbrook), gets mixed up with some Chechen hoodlums who want to use his father to expand their heroin business. He ends up killing them and then attempting to kill Mike, who is working as a limo driver and witnesses the event, but not before Jimmy intervenes and kills Danny. Shawn’s grief over his son’s death quickly morphs into vengeance, as he orders his henchmen to hunt down both Mike, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Jimmy, who must muster all his old skills to keep them both alive. The tension is enhanced by the estrangement of father and son, as Mike is disgusted by his father’s past and wants nothing to do with him, until he realizes that Jimmy is the only person who can keep him alive.

Shot in and around the mean streets of New York’s various outer boroughs, Run All Night is clearly meant to evoke the gritty crime dramas of the 1970s, where violence and corruption seethed from beneath every steaming manhole cover and out of every dark alleyway. There is a nod in the dialogue to how all the “old places” are changing, a clear reference to the gentrification of the Big Apple, but Collet-Serra still manages to find plenty of dark corners for the drama to unfold. Working with cinematographer Martin Ruhe (a favorite of photographer-turned-director Anton Corbijn), Collet-Serra mixes the sleek and the stark, and Run All Night tends to be at its best when it stays on ground level—in dark apartments, all-night diners, and on wet city streets beneath rumbling elevated trains. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t always stay grounded, and too many times the camera picks up and soars through the air over the city, moving us from location to location in a way that is visually showy, but without real purpose, unless the purpose is to rip us out of the moment. The editing can be overly frenetic, as well, resulting in too many whiplash action setpieces suffering from Michael Bay Syndrome, but at this point that is almost to be expected.

Yet, even with its various weaknesses, Run All Night works better than many films of its ilk, primarily because Collet-Serra has the benefit of training his camera on old pros like Neeson and Ed Harris, whose collective screen time playing hardened characters of both the good and bad variety is enough to imbue even the worst movie with an air of genuine gravitas. It’s not quite like De Niro and Pacino squaring off over a diner table in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), but the scene where Jimmy and Shawn sit across from each other in a respectable restaurant, with the former requesting that his son be spared and the latter assuring him that he won’t, has a frisson that emboldens even the most routine of action-movie moments. It also helps that the screenplay gives the characters shades of complexity and nuance, perhaps most strikingly when Shawn summarizes to Jimmy the ultimate pain caused by his son’s death: “It’s a hell of a thing to know you’re never going to make the woman you love happy again.” Shawn is cold and he’s ruthless, but he’s also human and capable of real love; Harris brings out those tensions with great dexterity, and Neeson plays off them expertly. Run All Night is old school in all the best ways, and it’s hard to enjoy it even if Collet-Serra can’t quite bring himself to let it play out under its own power and without resorting to distracting visual flourishes.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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