The Walker
I guess it’s ironic that I’ve been whining about running times lately and now, here we have a movie that’s pretty much the perfect length at 100 minutes … yet it’s so effing slow with those minutes – slow to begin, and, just when you think it might pick up, slow some more. I really had high hopes for this not only as a Paul Schrader movie (I loved Auto Focus and even his take on the Exorcist prequel wasn’t half bad in my eyes – and of course the early classics), but also as a Schrader movie that the director himself has said was partly conceived as a continuation of an unofficial “God’s Lonely Man” series, the first three parts of which being Taxi Driver, Light Sleeper and American Gigolo. Gigolo I can see here – and I’m not sure I’ve even seen that movie, but I get the comparison. Taxi Driver – not so much. And Light Sleeper, I couldn’t comment on.
The movie opens with a tantalising scene – a card game around which sit Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Lauren frickin’ Bacall. Quelle cast, that’s for sure. It’s sadly downhill to boresville thereafter. There’s certainly something here that haunted me as the credits rolled, and I wouldn’t rule out watching it again after familiarising myself more with the other three movies that “came before” it. But it’s undeniably dreadfully slow. Whether that’s a good or bad thing – part of me feels I could grow to like Schrader’s more classic approach to movie-making, it’s certainly re-assuring against all the brainless crap we’re seeing in the cinema, but part of me is simply just as ADD as everyone else – it’ll have to wait for another day to decide.