By: Dove
By now you’ve seen the trailers for the new action thriller Run All Night, which stars Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Ed Harris, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common and Genesis Rodriguez. If you’re wondering about your date-night this weekend, I can safely say that this film will be worth the price of admission.
As the story begins, we meet down and out ex-gangster Jimmy Conlon (Neeson), current gangster Shawn Maguire who can’t even(Harris), Shawn’s drug-loving gangster son Danny (played by Boyd Holbrook), and limo driver Mike (Kinnaman) and his wife Gabriela (Rodriguez). We quickly learn that Jimmy and his son Mike fell out years ago, and while Jimmy and Shawn were longtime friends and partners in crime, their lives took very different paths as well.
Through a course of very bad business and life decisions, Danny ends up dead at the hands of Jimmy. And this is where the all-night “run” begins.
Now Jimmy and his son Mike are forced to work together to survive as Shawn’s crew chases them down, because gangster code. You kill my son, I have to kill yours, right? Common leads the charge as single-minded assassin Price, who, as Common explained to us in his interview this week, used to be a part of the S&M world.
The energy in the film is equally thrilling and exhausting, pitting Jimmy and Mike against police and gangsters alike as they fight to stay alive to get to safety. On the flip side, there are some tremendous dramatic moments, particularly in exchanges between OG’s Jimmy and Shawn, and in the emotional father-son jousts between Jimmy and Mike.
Director Jaume Collett-Serra, known for his work on films like Non-Stop and Orphan, pulls off some pretty impressive visual effects with the editing team, and definitely found a way to get the most out of the cast in the gripping fight scenes. There are also some pretty cool cameos, so I won’t spoil those for you.
All in all, Run All Night is great escape into the seediest parts of modern-day New York. Two thumbs up!
