They don’t make ’em like “A Walk Among the Tombstones” any more. Mainly because everyone got bored with ’em and stopped watching ’em.

Based on a Lawrence Block novel, the movie is a throwback to ’70s private-eye TV shows, the ones about scowling hombres with manful names like Mannix or Banacek. Writer-director Scott Frank even throws in freeze frames at climactic moments.

Naturally our hero is an alcoholic gumshoe and former NYPD man, Matt Scudder (Liam Neeson), who gets hired by a drug dealer (Dan Stevens, a k a Matthew from “Downton Abbey”) to find out who kidnapped his wife and left her chopped up in a trunk in Red Hook.

Cracking the case comes a little too easily to Matt. A quick trip to the library to trawl through microfiche — this is 1999, and Matt is wary of newfangled stuff like Internet tubes and whatnot — yields a clever, adorable sidekick, T.J. (played by young actor Brian “Astro” Bradley), who seems like the last kid in New York to know who Sam Spade was. He, too, is a figure straight out of ’70s TV, though in his case he’s a sitcom type.

Witnesses who say they’re reluctant to talk simply change their minds and spill everything they know. One guy (a superb Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) who works at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where the remains of another chopped-up woman were found, acts so much like a man with secrets that Matt follows him home and breaks into his lair, one of those standard sheds-filled-with-evidence that TV murderers always maintain. “What gave me away?” asks the creepy guy. “Everything,” says Scudder. “You’re a weirdo.” He turns out to be surprisingly chatty for a guy who’s an accomplice to multiple slayings.

The movie grows less and less plausible as it goes, but Frank at least keeps things moving along competently, and his actors are engaging. Stevens, with his disreputable mustache and soul patch, does a nice job distancing himself from his “Downton” dreamboat.

But there’s nothing new here, nothing even pretending to be new, in a plot that glides along gentle curves instead of sharp twists. When there is a big reversal of fortune, this happens off-screen. Even the bad guys (whom we meet fairly early) are lackluster, more off-putting than terrifying.

Still, you could do worse than watch Neeson barking orders at kidnappers over the phone, and at such moments “Tombstones” is agreeably predictable. It’s a Dad movie.