Marlowe

This weekend, Marlowe, a new detective thriller starring Liam Neeson, released in theaters. Marlowe follows private investigator Phillip Marlowe as he is hired by the wealthy heiress Clare Cavendish to find her missing Ex-lover. During the investigation, he discovers there may be more to this case than meets the eye. I was interested in this movie as I like these Liam Neeson action thrillers that have been coming out recently and figured this would just be another dumb fun film in that genre.

Unfortunately, this film was not good. I never expected it to be a high-quality film and was more expecting just a dumb movie that was entertaining to watch. However, this movie was unable to even deliver that. There is very little action or any sort of tension in the film. The movie as a whole just comes across as really boring. Liam Neeson's performance felt like he was just sleepwalking through the movie as he doesn't appear to give much of any effort to his performance. The dialogue was also just really poorly written. All of the lines feel really lazy or just don't fit with what is going on in the scene. There are also lines where I think they were going for a joke but between the timing and the delivery, they just don't land at all. I thought the movie as a whole was very slow and was not as action-packed as the trailers implied. The movie also almost forces a romance between Marlowe and Clare when she is literally half his age and is old enough to be her father. Thankfully, they decided not to go that route but it was just an odd choice to tease that in the movie. Finally, while the movie was really slow and boring, it somehow still managed to have an unnecessarily complicated plot. There ends up being way too much going on by the end of the film and way too many characters involved for the movie to be able to easily follow.

Overall, this was a very disappointing and boring movie with an unnecessarily complicated plot. I was expecting, and the marketing promised, a typical Liam Neeson action thriller but sadly that was not the case.

Score: 4/10 Grade: D Recommendation: Skip it