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With: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Alan Cummings, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior, Ian Hart, François Arnaud
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Written by: William Monahan, Neil Jordan, based on a novel by John Banville
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Directed by: Neil Jordan
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MPAA Rating: R for language, violent content, some sexual material and brief drug use
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Running Time: 110
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Date: 02/17/2023
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Philip Side
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
While the mystery here may disappoint Raymond Chandler fans, the rest of this well-crafted detective movie enthralls with its stylish, sordid underworld and fresh take on a classic character.
It's 1939, and private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) receives a visit from society woman Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger). She hires him to locate her lover, Nico Peterson, who has been declared dead. Clare insists that he's still alive. Things get even twistier when Nico's sister Lynn (Daniela Melchior) is brutally murdered.
As Marlowe digs deeper, he finds himself in a world of faded movie stars (Jessica Lange) and dirty schemers and shady businessmen like Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming) and Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston), with everything leading to a powerful character called The Ambassador. After Hanson makes his move, capturing and torturing Hendricks to find the location of a valuable object, Marlowe teams up with Hendricks's driver, Cedric (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), to take matters into his own hands.
The acclaimed veteran Neil Jordan directs Marlowe, and his high level of skill and craftsmanship is immediately apparent. In a career that goes back forty years, Jordan has been most at home with crime stories, like the classic Mona Lisa. Additionally, he has worked with Liam Neeson several times, including on the biopic Michael Collins. Between them, there's hardly a misstep here, with Neeson finding Marlowe's complex moral center as well as his dry charm.
The catch is that this isn't a classic detective story like The Big Sleep. There isn't really an "ah-ha!" moment in which everything becomes clear. Marlowe is more of a cynical, subversive story — like Robert Altman's grungy version of Chandler's The Long Goodbye — using its familiar setting and characters to uncover hypocrisy, greed, and immorality. It can feel like a bit of a drag, but the point is not to wallow in nostalgia, but rather to suggest that the good ol' days were not necessarily the good ol' days.
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