The dialogue isn’t afraid to be fast, smart, complex, and witty.

Marlowe not only looks like those classic noir films of old, but it “reads” like one as well. The screenplay may also be part of the problem but in an oddly good way.

Pulled into a family drama that includes her mother Dorothy (Jessica Lange), crime boss Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming), and a private club owner named Danny Huston (Floyd Hanson), Marlowe finds himself uncovering a mystery that dives into the seedy underbelly of 1930s Hollywood. In it we find Marlowe (Neeson) taking on the case of femme fatale and heiress Clare Cavendale (Diane Kruger) after her lover is supposedly murdered. The movie is not based on any of Raymond Chandler’s original pulp novels but a 2014 Philip Marlowe story called The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black. It is, in a day and age of films deconstructing genre, an ironically innovative take, and for that, it should get some praise. In its first minute, Marlowe rapidly runs through a gamut of tropes of classic film noir, instantly telling the viewer that this film is playing noir straight - no neo-noir, neon noir, sci-fi noir, or any other spinoffs of the genre. This lady in red turns out to be a very brief red (literally) herring, but the rest of the shot is not. Pull back some more and we find a ruffled man smoking a cigarette looking out the window in his shadowed office, his name printed on the fogged glass door. The camera pans slowly, and as it does we see we’re viewing here from the building across the way, Venetian blinds obscuring our view. Marlowe, the new film starring Liam Neeson as the classic hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe, opens with a shot of a blonde in a red dress sitting in an office.

The black eyed blonde