Aarcflick

 “I'm getting too old for this,” muses Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson), after a disjointed fight. His latest on-screen foray, Neil Jordan's Marlowe, suggests that Raymond Chandler's noble gumshoe may be right, and that it's finally time for cinema's most famous hardened detective to retire from active screen duty. Based on one of several authorized print revivals of the character, John Banville's 2014 'The Black-Eyed Blonde', Jordan's film brings out some familiar thematic and stylistic tropes of noir, but beyond its self-reflexive touches and a Distinctly Irish in flavor, the film sheds little new light on a hero whose last truly revisionist incarnation was Elliott Gould's modern-day Marlowe in Robert Altman's 1973's The Long Goodbye. He is not so much an old hat as a sodden fedora. Lacking both Chandlerian charm and complexity, this version relies on Liam Neeson's handsome gaunt lead and some racy characters played by the likes of Dann...