Seventy years old and starring in his 100th film, Irish actor Liam Neeson dons the gumshoes and fedora for this good-looking but flabby homage to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the private dick immortalised by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep.

Liam Neeson in Marlowe. Photo supplied.

This screenplay isn’t derived from a Chandler original. Instead, writers Neil Jordan (also the film’s director) and William Monahan (The Departed) have adapted Irish writer John Banville’s 2014 novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, commissioned by the Chandler estate and written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black.

The film begins in classic style in Marlowe’s downtown office when an attractive and feisty femme fatale (Clare Cavendish, played by Diane Kruger) engages him to trace her missing beau.

It isn’t long before Marlowe locates him. Thing is, though, the guy – one Nico Peterson, a part-time gigolo working in the props department of a movie studio – is already dead meat on a morgue slab, his head squashed like a pumpkin in a traffic “accident” outside an exclusive nightclub.

Case closed you might think. The LAPD – represented here by British actor...