In 2014, Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, published The Black-Eyed Blonde—a mystery featuring Raymond Chandler’s iconic Los Angeles–based private eye, Philip Marlowe. Chandler wrote seven novels starring the tough, sardonic, and thoughtful detective, including some inarguable classics of the genre such as The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Long Goodbye (1953), which all received Kirkus stars. His influence on private-investigator mysteries is immense, and one can see elements of Marlowe in Robert B. Parker’s popular PI Spenser and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, to name just a few.

Parker certainly knew his stuff when it came to Chandler’s work. In 1989, he completed Poodle Springs, a Philip Marlowe novel that Chandler, who died in 1959, had left unfinished. Later, he wrote his own sequel to The Big Sleep, titled Perchance To Dream. Banville also knows his way around Chandler’s LA—it’s every bit as corrupt and crime-ridden as the original, with sketchy rich folk, femmes fatales, and violent thugs galore. Marlowe, too, is just as hard-bitten, witty, and wistful as ever. A new movie version of The Black-Eyed Blonde, however, doesn’t do the character justice. Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson in the title role, premieres in theaters on Feb. 15.

In Banville’s novel, set in the 1950s, Marlowe takes on a new client: the stunningly attractive, wealthy Clare Cavendish, who’s looking for Hollywood agent Nico Peterson, her ex-lover. He supposedly died after getting hit by a car in front of a swanky LA club, but she tells Marlowe that she recently saw him on a San Francisco street, alive and well. Marlowe questions people in Nico’s orbit, including his sister, who soon ends up dead at the hands of two kidnappers. It becomes clear that Nico—and Clare, with whom Marlowe gets romantically involved—are mixed up in some dirty dealings with dangerous people. Throughout the novel, Marlowe reminisces about people he’s known, including a major player from The Long Goodbye who proves key to the current case.

The Long Goodbye references are nowhere to be seen in the new movie version, which backdates the action to the late ’30s and features no narration by Marlowe himself. This is an unforgivable change, as the PI’s first-person point of view is one of the greatest strengths of Chandler’s work—and that holds for Banville’s homage, as well. Marlowe’s running commentary is well-known for its lively similes—early in The Big Sleep, for instance, the detective describes a balding client’s hair as being “like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock”—but it also reveals the detective as a sensitive soul: a man who knows the world is a hard place, but, deep down, wishes it didn’t have to be that way.

If you take the narration out, you just have a detective asking snarky questions and getting regularly beaten up. This pretty much describes the action in Marlowe, except that its version of the titular detective wins every single fight. Liam Neeson is still riding the wave of Taken, the violent 2008 action film that revitalized his career. He excels at fights, so director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) and screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) supply plenty of brutality in this film, including a late-in-the-game massacre involving a tommy gun. Other elements of the book are gone here: the relationship between Marlowe and Clare (listlessly played by National Treasure’s Diane Kruger) lacks any passion; the mystery, lacking the Long Goodbye twist, is pedestrian and predictable; and the conclusion has Chandler’s sleuth taking actions that seem out of character.

Neeson is a fine actor, but his portrayal of Marlowe as an unstoppable force feels wrongheaded here—more like Mickey Spillane’s skull-cracking gumshoe Mike Hammer than Chandler’s more nuanced creation. At least some of the secondary cast are entertaining; Alan Cumming has a fun turn as a crime boss, for instance, and Jessica Lange, as Clare’s mother, Dorothy, adds much-needed color to an underwritten role. Overall, though, fans of Chandler (and Banville) will be disappointed by this tepid cinematic tribute, which isn’t worthy of a single snappy simile.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.