Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Philip Marlowe doesn’t quite come back to life in this new movie from Neil Jordan, adapted from a novel by Booker prize winner John Banville, writing under his genre pen name Benjamin Black. There are some droll touches and the prewar Los Angeles production design looks good. But listening to the dialogue sometimes feels like wading through treacle. The wisecracks fizzle, and Liam Neeson, in the leading role, is not exactly on his most dynamic form. The way the character has been conceived seems to accentuate an exhausted worldweariness and, while I’m sure that Neeson could have given the part some of the wiry strength of a Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould, he somehow always looks as if he’d like nothing more than a sit-down with a cup of tea and a biscuit.
