Gritty A Walk Among the Tombstones is a not half-bad adaptation of the Lawrence Block novel, but half of it is the rest of the Matthew Scudder series, and that's at least part of how the movie fails, ultimately. Liam Neeson falls in and out of his hard NY accent, and his team-up with the street kid, TJ, is, as every critic bothering to deal with it has mentioned, inexplicable and ultimately pointless, but my issues are somewhat different. The book left Scudder slightly off the hook for the vengence required by the end, but also left him open in the series to something darker than it had otherwise painted him to be. The movie tries to do the same, to a point, but ties the revenge to his past in a way that makes him out to be incapable of the redemption his sobriety would otherwise. So we're left wondering who Scudder is, without any questioning by Scudder, as is more characteristic, at least to this point in the series, of the literary PI. I'm surprised, a little, that it's taken this long to make even one of these novels into a movie. Neeson is perfect (barring the accent), and the movie captures much of NYC as a lived place. They could have started earlier and had a franchise, but I don't think we're going to get that, but if nothing else, I think I'll go back to the books before long.