Enter Liam Neeson, 70 this year but still apparently capable of disabling five assailants at once with the right small arms and some smashable furniture in Marlowe, Neil Jordan’s frisky film noir pastiche.

He also has a tough crowd – film noir purists, who are legion – to please.

Nico Petersen (François Arnaud) is – or was – a prop master at a film studio, making regular trips to Mexico to buy cheap ornaments that are a literal cover for the drugs he deals in the bowels of an ostensibly classy casino.

Inevitably, he brings the trappings of that genre with him, right into the heart of film noir: even in Bogie’s raincoat, he is recognizably the action guy from Taken, impassive of face and firm of fist.

So he isn’t Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, to the chagrin of some viewers, but Jordan’s film isn’t Chandler either; it is based on The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black, the thriller writer who in real life is the Irish literary author John Banville.

The pacing, the use of light and the characters are illustrative: this is a film about film noir rather than the thing in itself.

It isn’t the first Marlowe film in color, but Jordan takes his color to the max, saturating it in golden light – sunshine outside and the glow of lamps inside – and then playing with that light, reflecting it from multiple mirrors, patterning entire scenes with stripes of shadow cast by Venetian blinds and sometimes peering through the refractions created by two windows in alignment.

A good deal of writing about film noir of the ‘30s and ‘40s delves into its resonances in a world wracked by economic depression and the threat – followed by the horrible reality – of war; it is seen as a theater of anxiety.