Express at Marrakech: Liam Neeson’s Marlowe is all style, no substance

Here’s the rest of it. Platinum blonde broad with tight crimps, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger). Her mother (Jessica Lange) with the money and the power. Her lover (Francois Arnaud), a minor player at a Hollywood studio, sporting the mandatory thin crocodile moustache, up to no good. A gangster (Alan Cummings) walking in a cloud of smoke. A fancy club, the spot for all kinds of dodgy activities. Boys, girls, drugs: you pay, you get. Everyone with something to hide, and a brutal murder to kickstart the proceedings.

The setting is just right. It’s LA, it’s 1939, the recession has left deep marks, and World War 2 is around the corner. A scene featuring a bunch of swastika-bearing Nazis causes a character to comment on how skillful Leni Refenstahl is, as a film-maker. But ‘Marlowe’, embedded in the bowels of Hollywood and its carpetbaggers, is interested only in creating images, and this is where the problem lies. This ‘Marlowe’ is a handsome picture, as old-style Hollywood mavens would call it, but it’s all surface; there’s very little going on underneath.

Only once in a while do you get a scene that pops. Lange makes the most of her older woman struggling to stay relevant. She’s someone who has lived by her wits for a long time, pretending to be who she is not. At one point, Marlowe looks at her, and says, “you’re a long way from Tipperary.” Yes, she is, and at one point, when the camera pauses at her face, naked, vulnerable, it’s a moment.

She is the most interesting character in this ensemble, which, given Chandler’s busy, complicated plots, scrambles to stay upright. No one else really matches up. Not Kruger whose glacial blonde demeanour stays unruffled when she is pumping bullets into a guy. And not even the leading man, who stays more Neeson than Marlowe, the moral centre of his shady world. He never feels rumpled enough, even when he says, “I’m just an ordinary joe trying to earn a buck and stay out of jail.”

It could be down to the fact that this new Marlowe’s source material comes from the 2014 novel, ‘The Black Eyed Blonde’ by John Banville, writing under the pen name Benjamin Black. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot a poster of the same name adorning a studio wall; ‘Marlowe’ feels like a series of posters rather than the right vehicle for the poster boy of the brooding private eye.