‘Run All Night’ review: A Non-Stop Action Movie,

Liam Neeson, left, plays New York hitman Jimmy Conlon who's on the run with his son Mike (Joel Kinnaman, at right) in "Run All Night". (Myles Aronowitz/Warner Bros. Pictures)

For several minutes, Run All Night, the latest Liam-Neeson-Kills-People movie, is an actual “movie” in a very old-fashioned sense.

That is to say that two accomplished actors, Liam Neeson and Ed Harris, face off with nothing but a restaurant table-and-chair, communicating in silences and some carefully-crafted words about the sad inevitability of a coming bloodbath – one fueled by the death of a son and an almost-Shakespearean sense of tragedy and consequence.

The characters are Jimmy “The Gravedigger” Conlon (Neeson) and his mob boss and lifelong friend Shawn Maguire (Harris). In the olden days, you could expect more moments like this, occasionally punctuated by scenes of violence that would intrude like a slap in the face.

In the context of a movie like the aptly-named Run All Night, it’s one of the few moments where the movie stops to take a breath from all the carnage.

So let’s dispense with the nostalgia (though the scene above really does remind you that these two can actually act) and consider how well Run All Night quacks alongside other ducks – like, say, any of the Taken movies.

Purely in a technical sense, director Jaume Collet-Serra is a cut above most action directors. The man who made the underrated creep-fest Orphan turns out to have more in his bag of tricks than the vice-like ability to tighten tension. Apparently there’s also a syringe of adrenaline in there too.

Run All Night – in which Jimmy and his estranged son Michael (a grim Joel Kinnaman) alternately flee for their lives and fight back – swoops through the streets of New York City like the unseen demons in The Evil Dead. It uses pieces of scenery as “wipes” to jarringly move from place to place.

There are even a few twists on some action movie tropes – including a car chase where the cop car is uncharacteristically the chase-ee.

That said, it’s well-crafted creative wrapping over a lot of empty noise. The funniest line, in hindsight, comes early in the movie when Vincent D'Onofrio (playing, apparently, the only non-corrupt cop in the city) meets Jimmy in a Diner and tries to prey on his conscience, asking him, rhetorically, whether his career kill-count was 16 or 17.

Really? Heck, that many people get killed before the first act is over. Neeson could have done that alone without the jarringly incongruous presence of Common as a Terminator-like contract-killer (whose lack of dialogue makes Arnold look like a chatterbox).

Oh, and speaking of quick hits, watch for Nick Nolte’s single scene (Is it in his contract that he has to look like a homeless guy? Does he even need makeup?)

The simple premise – the mob and their cop allies in shoot-to-kill mode against Jimmy, Michael and his wife and kids – is transparently a means to an end. Or rather to the bloody end of scores of characters who seem less real than first-person-shooter video game targets.

In the context of what movies mean in the 21st Century, though, it’s a non-stop, bloody roller-coaster fun-ride.