Neeson can't save a stumbling 'Walk Among the Tombstones'

With its latest thriller, Universal arrives a day late and a few dollars short in the Liam "Particular Skills" Neeson revenge sweepstakes.

"A Walk Among the Tombstones" has the veneer of high-mindedness that the "Taken" movies lack. But it has Neeson's Alcoholics Anonymous detective hanging out with a slang-cracking kid (Astro) and working for a drug dealer played by that "Downton Abbey" fussbudget Dan Stevens.

The plot has psych-homosexual elements straight out of the 1950s. The violence against women is horrific, and the setting, for no serious reason, is 1999 as the United States braces for the Y2K bug.

Aside from that, though, it's just great. Well, kind of OK.

Neeson's Matthew Scudder was a hard-drinking cop in the early '90s when an off- duty shootout led him to quit the force. Now he's an "unlicensed" problem-solver. Sort of like Denzel Washington in the upcoming and superior "The Equalizer."

Stevens is Kenny, a "drug trafficker" whose wife was snatched and murdered. He wants the guys who did it.

So Scudder does the shoe-leather work he would have done as a cop, had the drug trafficker wanted cops involved. He asks around.

Writer-director Scott Frank — who did the far superior thriller "The Lookout" — objectifies one underage victim, setting her stalking to a golden oldie "Atlantis" by Donovan. His villains are sniggering caricatures out of an earlier age.

And he utterly fails to build Scudder's AA mania into the plot until the third act, losing track of this aspect of his life to make room for more cutesie T.J. slang-jokes about how "I want to grow up to be a private eye like Sam Spade."