“Forty-four years have passed since a feature film was last built around Raymond Chander’s harder-than-hardboiled fictional detective Philip Marlowe — a screen absence that seems both unduly long and now, in the wake of Neil Jordan’s Marlowe, not quite long enough.
“A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir, the film is adapted not from a Chandler work but ‘The Black-Eyed Blonde,’ an authorized Marlowe entry from 2014, by Irish novelist John Banville. Minus Banville’s own knack for literary ventriloquism, however, this all too evidently European co-production can’t help but feel multiple degrees removed from the real thing, not helped by the shuffling, ungainly presence of a wildly miscast Liam Neeson in shoes once filled by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.” — from Guy Lodge‘s 9.24.22 Variety review.