Run All Night review: Neeson gets to be Neeson and others get to be shot

Can you remember a time before Liam Neeson was an action hero? It wasn’t that long ago, but so complete has been the transformation that such pondering is akin to imagining the world before electricity.

We don't get too many tweaks to the formula in the latest tolerable romp from Jaume Collet-Serra. As with all the most Neesony Neeson films, Run All Night – appalling title, incidentally – is a revenge thriller. The amazing reversal here is that, for once, Liam is the avenged rather than the avenger. Screenwriters purchase cabin cruisers on the back of great ideas such as that.

Despite being greatly on the Ballymena man’s side, we can’t quite buy the opening scenes in which, bullied by Boyd Holbrook’s spoilt gangster bastard, he essays a drunken, depressed Santa who commits every seasonal enormity short of weeing in the plum duff. Liam can take that as a backhanded compliment. He is too buoyed up by manly charisma to convince in so undignified a role. John Wayne would also have struggled.

Never fear. Before too long something awful happens and gangster Ed Harris (characteristically humourless) sets the hounds on his pal from the “old neighbourhood”. Now, Neeson gets to be Neeson and others get to be shot.

The New York Irish gangster ambience is drizzled rather than slavered over a chase thriller that takes in some first-class shooting, an excellent car chase and some noisily eccentric casting. (It's depressing to observe that, though only 11 years older, Nick Nolte is all too convincing as Neeson's father.) There is rather more of it than is strictly necessary, but Run All Night will do well enough for a shoulder-season screen holder.