MARLOWE (2023)

MARLOWE stars Liam Neeson as an older version of popular mystery author Raymond Chandler’s detective Phillip Marlowe, who, in a story strangely set in 1939, when Marlowe would be significantly younger, is hired to find a wealthy married woman’s lover who’s disappeared, a case that becomes more complicated and violent as it develops. Based on a novel by an Irish writer, MARLOWE is a somewhat pale imitation of the real thing that replaces the heroic detective’s wry and humorous, but cynical, moral melancholy with a more serious, downbeat attitude that includes stronger foul language and a lesser commitment to justice.

The movie opens with a wealthy married blonde woman named Claire Cavendish hiring Marlowe to find her missing lover, Nico. Claire says she met Nico at a private club for rich people, but that he didn’t show up at their latest scheduled meeting and that newspaper have piled up outside his house.

Claire is coy about what Nico does for a living, but Marlowe finds out he manages the prop warehouse for a movie studio. He also finds out that Nico’s dead body was found outside the private club, after a vehicle hit him and ran over his head. The Bay City police have labeled the case an accidental hit and run, but Marlowe thinks it may have been murder.

Marlowe goes to Claire’s house to inform her of Nico’s death, but Claire tells him that she knows Nico is still alive because she just saw him in Tijuana, Mexico during a visit there. When Marlowe asks her why she didn’t tell him this in the beginning, Claire says she didn’t want to influence and prejudice his investigation.

Anyway, as Marlowe continues his investigation, the case becomes more complicated and more dangerous. It turns out that Claire’s mother is a long time widow and former actress associated with the studio where Nico worked. In fact, she actually owns all the wealth in the family and has an ongoing romantic relationship with the former bootlegger who owns the studio, a wealthy Irish guy patterned after President John F. Kennedy’s corrupt father.

It also turns out that Nico works on the side for a gangster associated with the private club, and the gangster is looking for something that Nico supposedly has. Also, the gangster is involved in prostitution and selling heroin and cocaine.

Can Marlowe unravel the case? Also, when two of the gangster’s Mexican associates kidnap Nico’s younger sister, can he save the girl?

MARLOWE the movie (not to be confused with the 1969 movie starring James Garner as the eponymous detective) engages viewers with an interesting, hardboiled whodunnit. However, it’s a somewhat pale imitation of the real thing. It replaces the wry and humorous, but cynical, moral melancholy of Raymond Chandler’s heroic detective with a more serious, downbeat attitude. Also, while there’s always a sordid quality to parts of Chandler’s hardboiled detective stories (there are some seriously flawed characters and mean and vicious criminals in the stories), it seems to be heightened in the case of this movie, which is based on a 2014 novel written by acclaimed Irish writer. Also, in this new version, although Marlowe becomes morally outraged by the murder of one innocent character, his response becomes unnecessarily brutal. Then, at the very end, although he sees to it that some really bad guys are punished, he lets one bad guy get away with a murder. Viewers who enjoy Chandler’s detective stories can compare the ending to this story to the ending of one of Chandler’s best novels, FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, where the femme fatale gets away on her own, but ends up being tracked down by the police and going out in a blaze of “glory.” Thus, there’s always a strong moral core to Phillip Marlowe in the original novels, but this MARLOWE has a more tarnished moral core that seems less committed to justice. As Chandler once noted, all great art has some redemptive quality to it.

MARLOWE also has some extreme violence, 15 anachronistic, gratuitous “f” words and three strong profanities. There are no “f” words in the original Chandler novels.