Marlowe (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Private detective Philip Marlowe searches for a dead man.

the review: Some movies get dismissed by critics seemingly without their ever having watched them at all.  I assume Marlowe was simply because it was another Liam Neeson movie in the era of Taken, when he's chosen to star in an endless series of movies of that ilk.  The other reason would be the pointless crusade of the media to protect Old Hollywood by immediately rejecting anything that could possibly evoke it.  Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was of course the character Bogart played in The Big Sleep, one of his Big Three roles alongside The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.  

At its heart Marlowe is of course evoking classic film noire, but not as obviously as, say, the Sin City movies.  It isn't shot in black and white, for instance.  The storytelling beats are all there.  The end of the movie evokes Maltese Falcon, even Raiders of the Lost Ark, making a joke of the whole idea of the maguffin, since the real point was exploring the nasty secrets of Hollywood (apparently no way to make a living making movies these days).  Having recently rewatched The Third Man, I couldn't help but think of Marlowe as more that kind of movie, although of course its inversion, since Third Man famously stars Orson Welles, whom we don't see until about the third act, whereas Neeson is obviously the star of Marlowe and its "third man" is another very capable Mexican actor doomed to be ignored by mainstreatm modern Hollywood (hello, Die in a Gunfight!), who just so happens to sound like Brad Pitt.  The whole point of casting Neeson in a movie like this is to draw on the Taken mystique, to find Marlowe credible in all his story beats.  But Marlowe is otherwise nothing like Taken.  In fact, most of Neeson's Taken movies try to find some interesting variation.  I remember Unknown finding interesting things.  Marlowe has more in common with A Walk Among the Tombstones than Taken.  But critics want Neeson to star in another sad Irish epic like Rob Roy or Michael Collins, or Schindler's List.  Forget that they ignore stellar work in Silence, A Monster Calls.

The director is the reliable Neil Jordan, the screenwriter William Monohan, neither of whose work deserves such casual dismissal.  Neeson has Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger as his dames to kill for, the likes of Danny Huston (born for this role, possibly his best iteration of it, in such a pure state), Alan Cumming, even Colm Meaney, Adawale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (playing the role Dennis Haysbert did in the second Sin City, but a heroic version).

This is a version of classic Hollywood, sure, but the version that was possible to make in 2023.  You don't win any points by claiming "they did it better back then."  There are so many versions of so many stories told over so many thousands of years, you don't win points by stating, "they did it a hundred years ago."  Characters like Marlowe are liable to disappear if they don't resurface every now and then.  Eventually no one will care Bogart played him.  If he's no longer relevant, it doesn't matter.

This is an excellent way to bring him back around again.  If the critics want to contradict themselves and claim there's no point bringing Marlowe back and that it's just another forgettable post-Taken movie for Neeson...It's their loss.  For the art of film, this is everyone's gain.  A movie I was very pleased to press "play" again when there were things I missed.