10 Films That Should Have Ended Ten Minutes Earlier

3. A Walk Among The Tombstones

Although at one point its music is rather overtly invoking Goodfellas, the film that A Walk Among The Tombstones feels most indebted to is The Silence Of The Lambs. Although the latest in Liam Neeson's bad-ass phase is on paper the usual retired cop adventure, in plot, with its sadistic, sexually motivated killers and our hero coming to the story in the middle, it's closest to the showdown between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill.

It'd be easy to state the real strength of Jonathan Demme's 1990 thriller was in a superior source, but while Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels are above-par, it's Demme and his actor's treating of the story and characters seriously that made Lambs such an insta-classic. Scott Frank, whose writing history far outweighs his direction, doesn't bring the same edge to A Walk Among The Tombstones, but still manages to craft a enjoyable mystery thriller, with Neeson as dependable as always.

The problem most thrillers based come up against is that they find it almost impossible to overcome the desire to turn the final act into an epic action showdown. Gotta give the average joe something, right? And it's here Tombstones falls down. The mystery's solved, the killers located, but we still have to sit through an extended sequence brought about only by character ineptitude.