5/20/17: In Space, No One Can Hear You Shrug

Tags

2017 films, Alien, Alien: Covenant, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demien Bichir, film franchise, Guy Pearce, James Franco, Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, prequels, Prometheus, Ridley Scott, sci-fi-horror, sequels

It ain’t easy successfully continuing a film franchise after decades have passed: audiences change, filmmakers change, society changes…it’s a real dice toss. After all: who wants to potentially tarnish prior glories and dampen whatever warm feelings fans might have garnered over the years? For every Fury Road (2015), you have a Godfather Part III (1990)…like I said: dice toss.

Tasked with following up his own Alien (1979), Ridley Scott responded with a befuddling prequel, Prometheus (2012): part origin story, part gorgeous creation fable, it used the Alienverse as a springboard for a discussion on the creation of mankind and its inevitable destruction. Light on the franchise’s beloved Xenomorphs, Prometheus was its own beast, warts and all, although scarcely deserving of the derision piled upon it by franchise fans. For the follow-up, Alien: Covenant (2017), Scott doubles-down on the surface trappings of the Alienverse while neglecting to add the elements that made Alien so special in the first place:  genuine heart and soul.

Taking place a decade after Prometheus, Covenant introduces us to the crew of the titular generation ship that’s transporting thousands of cyrogenically-frozen colonists to a new home in a far-flung galaxy. We meet Oram (Billy Crudup), the ship’s second-in-command; Daniels (Katherine Waterston), this film’s Ripley; pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride); security-chief Lope (Demian Bichir); android Walter (Michael Fassbender, pulling double duty as sinister David); Karine (Carmen Ejogo), the resident biologist; and another half-dozen or so crew-members/cannon fodder.

After a freak accident costs the team their captain (James Franco, in a walk-on), Oram makes the questionable decision to investigate a strange audio transmission that comes from a previously undiscovered planet. Despite the protestations of ultra-sensible Daniels, the crew adjusts course and are promptly marooned on a world that seems to serve as both paradise and necropolis. In short order, they meet the planet’s sole inhabitant, Prometheus’ David, and find out the terrible truth behind the dead planet they’ve found themselves on.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, right off the bat: Covenant is not a good film. It’s not a good Alien film, in particular, but it’s also not a good film, in general, arguably representing the nadir of Scott’s impressive career. Lackluster CGI notwithstanding (generously speaking, the look is generic and the creature effects are severely lacking), the film suffers from a bad script (the dialogue is awful and the character building is non-existent), generally dismal performances (only Fassbender really acquits himself, with Waterston and McBride coming off particularly awkwardy) and the overall feeling that this is only a placeholder film for a much grander “finale.”

This is a film that strives to introduce new variants on the traditional Xenomorph (the new, albino version could have come from any of a dozen recent films) while shoehorning in scenes like the one where a hesitant character is practically goaded into sticking his head into one of the iconic egg pods, with the resulting re-introduction of the face-hugger coming not as an organic shock but a tired and foregone punchline to a bad joke. This is the worst case of “having your cake and wanting to eat it, too”: Covenant gorges on leftovers like they’re going out of style.

None of the cast or characters stick in the mind after viewing, unlike the original. Katherine Waterston is a poor patch on Sigourney Weaver, her Daniels more a reactive agent of the story than any iconic hero. Crudup blends into the background, as does Bichir and, to be fair, pretty much any actor that isn’t Fassbender. This isn’t to say that he puts out career-defining work, mind you, just that his Walter/David combo winds up with the lion’s share of the film’s smartest material: talk about a stacked deck!

On the plus side? The gore effects are plentiful and fairly juicy (for what that’s worth) and there are moments that approach the chilly, visual grandeur that elevated Prometheus to something beyond its B-movie trappings. The Pompei-inspired world surface is undeniably cool and the hints we get of a primordial source for the original contagion prove more tempting hints than anything substantial but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t both appreciated and well-done. Scattered moments out of a 2+hour film don’t really signify a smash success, however, no matter how you do the math.

As someone who genuinely enjoyed and respected Prometheus, I really wanted Covenant to knock this out of the park: that Scott managed to whiff it so completely comes as a bit more than a disappointment. In truth, however, the film lost me from the get-go and never got me back: there was no point where this felt like anything more than the disposable middle entry in a longer, better series. From the unnecessary intro to the disposable characters…from the forgettable creature designs to the truly stupid script…from the terrible, Starship Troopers-esque shower scene to the tedious, frenetically-edited action beats…Alien: Covenant has very little to recommend it.

There were plenty of great ideas here (the notion of an all-powerful mad scientist with a God complex trapped on a dead planet, by itself, is solid gold) but precious little in the way of skillful execution. Scott is capable of much better: he’s proven it, time and time again. By trying to please everyone, however, the pro and anti-Prometheus camps alike, Scott ends up disappointing everyone: neither significantly advancing the Prometheus storyline nor adding anything of value to the classic canon, Covenant just exists…nothing more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/25/15: The Man With Nothing Has Nothing to Lose

Tags

Animal Kingdom, anti-hero, Antony Partos, Australia, Australian films, brothers, car chases, cat-and-mouse chase, cinema, David Field, David Michôd, dramas, dysfunctional family, film reviews, films, foreign films, Gillian Jones, Guy Pearce, Jamie Fallon, Joel Edgerton, Keri Hilson, Mad Max, Movies, Natasha Braier, post-Apocalyptic, road trip, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy, set in Australia, stolen car, Tawanda Manyimo, The Rover, The Way of the Gun, writer-director-producer

Midway through David Michôd’s post-apocalyptic The Rover (2014), Rey (Robert Pattinson), a possibly mentally disabled young man, relates a rambling, seemingly pointless story to Eric (Guy Pearce), his captor: as Rey yammers on and on, we watch as frustration and boredom wage war across Eric’s sun-bleached, weathered face, his quick-set lips constantly suppressing some sort of cranky comeback. After Rey finishes his story, Eric regards him with something approaching contempt and snaps, “Why’d you tell me that?” The young man shrugs and nonchalantly states: “It was interesting and I remembered it…not everything has to be about something.”

In a way, that’s as good a micro-philosophy for Michôd’s film as any: indeed, if one boiled The Rover down to its essential parts, one would get a narrative that consists entirely of a man pursuing another group of men in order to retrieve his stolen car. This is overly reductive, of course, since there’s a bit more going on here than that (The Rover is definitely about “something”) but Australian writer-director Michôd, who first hit the public eye with his brutal Animal Kingdom (2010), is a master of economy and the whole thing buzzes along with the extreme focus of the best single-minded revenge flicks. Think of this as a moodier Mad Max (1979) minus the tricked-out cars, intense action setpieces and over-the-top characters and you’re definitely in the right vicinity.

We begin in Australia, ten years after some sort of ill-defined “collapse” has led to some pretty miserable conditions: everything seems sun-baked and cracked, food and water are now luxury items and every single person packs as much heat as they can possibly carry. Into this heat-mirage of failure steps Eric, as beaten-down and weathered as the landscape around him. While stopping at what appears to be a nearly empty “water saloon,” Eric kicks back for a moment of peace and quiet, during which absolute disaster strikes: his one and only possession, his beat-up car, is stolen by a trio of thieves on the lam, Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo), Archie (David Field) and Henry (Scoot McNairy). The trio have just crashed their truck and jack Eric’s before he can stop them.

Jumping into their abandoned vehicle, Eric gives chase, on the thieves’ tail like flies on cow-shit. After a suitably thrilling cat-and-mouse chase, Eric gets out to confront them, at which point he’s cold-cocked and left to wake up in the dirt. As he continues his pursuit, Eric runs into Rey, Henry’s gut-shot brother. Seems that Rey was injured in whatever heist the group was involved in and the others just left him there, rather than dragging his soon-to-be carcass around. Since Rey claims to know where the group is headed, Eric takes him along, with the stipulation that he’ll slit his throat if Henry and the others aren’t where Rey says they’ll be. From that point on, Eric and Rey travel in uneasy companionship, their relationship never as simple as “captor and captive” or “traveling companions,” but never quite as cold-blooded as Eric’s relentless pursuit of his car. As the duo get closer and closer to their destination, Rey will have to make some awfully difficult decisions about family, loyalty and doing the right thing, even as Eric continues to shave his own humanity down to the bone, turning himself into a killer as remorseless and barren as the landscape around him.

For the most part, The Rover is well-made, heartfelt and consistently interesting, albeit  a tad confusing, from time to time. The script, based on an idea that Michôd developed with actor Joel Edgerton, is lean and mean, wasting as little time as possible on anything that doesn’t propel the story (and the characters) forward. Due to this economy, we don’t get much in the way of character development whatsoever (the only backstory we receive regarding the protagonist is one extremely confusing tidbit related after he’s been captured by the military and the film’s twist ending), which tends to give the various people we meet a rather “half-formed” nature.

In particular, the scenes involving Grandma (Gillian Jones) and the strange, old man at the film’s conclusion are enigmatic precisely because they’re sort of dumped on us with no explanation as to their significance. The bit involving the old man is particularly frustrating, since it seems to involve a fundamental emotional beat with Eric that never makes much sense: he seems to have an emotional reaction to someone he’s never met, for no perceptible reason, when he’s been largely emotionless before that. There’s also zero development with the trio of thieves, although McNairy and Pattinson do get a nicely emotional bit during the climax: Caleb and Archie are never anything more than generic types, however, giving their ultimate fates next to no real importance. While many films are filled with faceless villains, this seems an odd tact to take for a film that only features a small handful of actors: a little more depth would have opened up the film immensely.

From a production-standpoint, The Rover looks and sounds great: Natasha Braier’s cinematography perfectly captures the sun-bleached desolation of the uncompromising landscape and the occasional nods to an “artier” style (the slo-mo car flying by the window as Eric sits at the bar, drinking water and listening to an Asian pop song on the radio, for example) prevent the film from ever looking too “utilitarian.” The moody score, by Antony Partos, is particularly good: there’s one supremely cool driving sequence where the score approximates the sparse keyboard squelches of No-Wave legends Suicide and I, for one, could not stop grinning. I also got a kick out of the way Keri Hilson’s “Pretty Girl Rock” (you know, the “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful,” song) scores a key setpiece: while the film is never less than dour, it’s pretty obvious that a subtle (very, very subtle) stream of dark humor runs through everything.

Performance-wise, I was quite taken by both Pearce and Pattinson: Pattinson, in particular, turns Rey into the kind of twitchy, fidgety weirdo that seems a million miles from his usual roles and I agreed with almost all of his acting choices, although his odd, slightly slurred accent is often more than a little hard to parse. Pearce, for his part, can pretty much do these kinds of roles in his sleep and his world-weary, defeated but determined take on Eric is sturdy and feels authentic. One of the most interesting aspects regarding the character of Eric is just how poorly he fits the role of “hero”: hell, even “anti-hero” seems a bit of a stretch, at times. For much of the film, Eric is violent, uncompromising and kills at the drop of a hat, often with as little provocation as possible. The final twist makes his character more sympathetic (barely) but the road leading there is paved with plenty of “questionable” activities, as it were. It’s to Pearce’s great credit that we’re always on Eric’s side, even if it’s not always easy (or possible) to agree with his actions.

Ultimately, I enjoyed, but didn’t love, The Rover. On the plus side, the film stakes out a claim as a reasonable neo-Western, ala The Way of the Gun (2000) and that will always receive my stamp of approval. Michôd’s film looks and sounds great, slotting in nicely with similar Australian fare, such as the aforementioned Mad Max, as well as “arty” post-apocalyptic films like Bellflower (2011). There are also plenty of good performances here, including an above-average turn by Robert Pattinson in a rather non-typical role. On the downside, the film feels a little long, especially for such a streamlined narrative, and I never felt emotionally engaged with it until the final revelation, which does end up packing a bit of a punch. That being said, fans of low-key post-apocalyptic tales should find plenty to approve of, even if the final result is decidedly less than a game-changer.

10/23/14 (Part Two): Eat To Live, Don’t Live To Eat

Tags

31 Days of Halloween, Anthony B. Richmond, Antonia Bird, Bill Brochtrup, black comedies, cannibalism, cannibals, cinema, cowardice, Damon Albarn, David Arquette, favorite films, film reviews, films, forts, gallows' humor, gory films, Grand Guignol, Guy Pearce, horror, horror films, isolation, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Joseph Running Fox, Manifest Destiny, Mexican-American War, Michael Nyman, Movies, Neal McDonough, Ravenous, Robert Carlyle, set in the 1840s, Sheila Tousey, Sierra Nevadas, Stephen Spinella, Ted Griffin, U.S. army, wendigo, Westward expansion

For my money, Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) has to be one of the most under-rated films out there: it’s certainly one of the most under-rated horror films, which is a real head-scratcher considering just how good the movie is. Perhaps audiences were thrown off by the subject matter (cannibalism has the virtue of still being one of the few remaining Western taboos) or found the tone confusing (an argument that’s certainly valid, if needlessly reductive). Maybe genre audiences were resistant to a horror film helmed by a female director (Bird replaced the original director a few weeks into filming), a terribly stupid prejudice that’s haunted the genre practically from its inception. Regardless of the reason for its “shunning,” however, the facts remain the same: Ravenous is one hell of a great film and deserves to be mentioned in any list of the best films of the ’90s.

Set in the American West, circa 1847, we’re introduced to the character of Captain John Boyd (Guy Pearce) as he receives a medal for his bravery during the Mexican-American War. The irony, as we see via choice flashbacks and the withering comments of Boyd’s superior officer, General Slauson (John Spencer), is that Boyd is actually a coward: as his men were getting slaughtered left and right, Boyd hid himself under a mountain of bodies and pretended to be dead. Once all of his men were dead and the Mexican soldiers’ attention was elsewhere, Boyd slipped out and, single-handedly, captured the Mexican encampment. A one-man army? Definitely award-worthy! A coward who watches his own troops get butchered? Better get a broom: this is getting swept under the rug, folks.

As “reward,” Boyd is sent to remote Fort Spencer, an isolated and rarely used way-station for travelers in the Sierra Nevadas: the U.S. army loves him so much, they don’t want him anywhere around. At the fort, Boyd meets his new comrades, an exceptionally strange bunch of folks if there ever were any: Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), the commanding officer, is a philosophical man who reads books in their original language because the fort “thrives on tedium”; Major Knox (Stephen Spinella), the next in command, is a falling-down drunk who also serves as the fort’s resident doctor (“Don’t get sick,” is Hart’s sage advice to Boyd); Pvt. Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the group’s missionary, is a real nutcase who’s given to talking to himself in hushed tones and writing fervent religious poetry at the drop of a hat; the “over-medicated” Pvt. Cleaves (David Arquette), the perma-stoned cook who spends the majority of his time getting high and giggling; Pvt. Reich (Neal McDonough), the creepily cheerful, gung-ho soldier who’s given to standing in freezing ponds and primal screaming; and the fort’s resident Native Americans, Martha (Sheila Tousey) and her brother George (Joseph Running Fox), who also happens to be Cleaves’ smoking buddy. In other words, you have just about the most interesting group of characters (and actors) that you could possibly get…and it only gets better from there.

One night, the general boredom of the fort’s routine is upset when the group spy a mysterious, haggard mountain-man outside, in the freezing snow. Rushing him inside, the group finds him weak and nearly dead, but still kicking. After administering to him, they learn that the man is F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a Scottish immigrant who was travelling with a wagon train that found disaster in the unforgiving Sierra Nevadas. The train’s leader, Col. Ives, was an incompetent man who led them astray and got them all stranded in an underground cave. As the harsh winter set in around them, the group quickly blew through their food rations before turning to their pack animals and things like their leather belts and shoes. When those ran out, the group began to cannibalize the dead, some with more gusto than others, according to Colqhoun. Ives, in particular, became a monster who gleefully chowed his way through all of the survivors until it was just him, Colqhoun and another woman. Fleeing into the night, Colqhoun left Ives and the woman behind in the cave, a cowardly act that serves as a fitting parallel to Boyd’s own act of self-preservation.

Upon hearing that Ives and the woman may still be alive in the cave, Hart wastes no time in organizing a rescue mission, taking Boyd, George, Toffler, Reich and Colqhoun with him, as Knox stays behind to mind the fort. On the way, Toffler ends up getting injured, which leads to the unsettling incident where Colqhoun is discovered licking the missionary’s wound as they all sleep in their tents. Colqhoun, it would appear, has a bit of an impulse control problem. He’s also quite the liar, as the group discovers when they reach the cave and find a much different, more horrible scenario than the one Colqhoun so helpfully described. With the tables turned, Boyd is soon engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Colqhoun, a struggle that ends with Boyd grievously injured and trapped in a hole in the woods.

After freeing himself, Boyd returns to the fort only to discover that General Slauson and his men are already there: Hart’s party is still missing and Slauson has come down to lead the search. He’s also brought a new commanding officer with him, someone to run Fort Spencer in Hart’s absence…a cheerful, friendly fellow by the name of Col. Ives. From this point on, the film becomes a brilliant cat-and-mouse game as Boyd tries desperately to convince those around him that Ives is not only an imposter but a supernaturally strong, blood-thirsty cannibal, as well. Ives has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, however, and he’s a patient man: he’s more than happy to wait as Boyd becomes more and more entangled in his web. The whole thing builds to a Grand Guignol climax that features one of the most intense, amazing mano-a-mano battles that I’ve ever seen (think Family Guy’s “Chicken vs Peter” fights but with live-action actors and gallons of blood), all before finishing up with one of the most subtle, succinct commentaries on the human condition ever put to screen.

I remember going to see Ravenous in the theaters when it first came out and being so absolutely blown away by it that I promptly went to see it again. As soon as I was able, I bought the DVD and have happily revisited the film at least once a year for over a decade. Obviously, I’m quite fond of the movie: it’s actually one of my favorite films, let alone one of my favorite horror films. What, exactly, appeals to me so much about this marvelous little gem? In a nutshell, Ravenous is one smart film, from beginning to end and if there’s anything I appreciate, laud and worship, it’s a smart film.

One of the biggest complaints levied against Ravenous is that the film is tonally inconsistent, so schizophrenic as to almost be two films jammed into one: a slapstick comedy, complete with “zany” sound effects, and a serious, gore-drenched horror movie about cannibals and Wendigos. This tendency is evident from the very first frame, where Nietzche’s famous quote about fighting monsters is followed by the immediate rejoinder, “Eat Me!,” credited to “Anonymous.” The second comment pops up with one of those aforementioned “zany” sound effects, which creates a completely jarring tone when juxtaposed with composer Michael Nyman and Blur frontman Damon Albarn’s austere bluegrass-y score. All of this is balanced against Anthony B. Richmond’s absolutely stunning cinematography: the snowy mountain setting is truly beautiful.

Rather than being a handicap, I’ve always felt that Ravenous’ split-tone was one of its greatest assets. Despite the occasionally slapstick action, the film is never silly or stupid: instead, it uses the frequent gallows’ humor and moments such as Colqhoun/Ives’ sarcastic asides to keep the audience in a constant state of uneasiness. From one moment to the next, it’s all but impossible to predict the film’s next move: a gleefully insane gore setpiece might sit uncomfortably next to a masterfully executed comedic scene. One of the film’s best moments is the one where Hart asks Boyd about his hobbies, only to be told he enjoys swimming: after a long pause, Hart casts an eye outside, at the frozen landscape, before giving the priceless rejoinder, “Hope you don’t mind hard water.” Classic! Likewise, the excellent, atmospheric score (truly some of Albarn’s best work) helps pull the mood in a million directions at once: the film’s main theme is very catchy and evocative and serves to accentuate several key moments, helping to do a little of the heavy lifting, thematically speaking.

And that cast…oh, boy…that cast…Any film that features Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, Stephen Spinella and John Spencer should be guaranteed more than its fair share of eyeballs glued to the screen but, alas, even this star power wasn’t enough to pull in the ticket-buyers. It’s a real shame, too, because Carlyle’s performance as Colqhoun/Ives is not only one of his very best performances (pretty much second only to the marvelous piece of shit that is Begbie) but it’s reason enough to see the film, hands down. Quite simply, Carlyle turns in one of the all-time best villainous performances I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. He’s so good, in fact, that I’ll stack his performance next to any cinematic villain from the dawn of the Nickelodeons right up to yesterday: Colqhoun/Ives is an unforgettable creation and Carlyle should have been praised from here to the moon for the performance, hands down.

For me, one of the saddest aspects to Ravenous’ box-office failure was the way that it effectively cut Antonia Bird’s cinematic career short. Predominantly a television director until her big-screen debut with Priest (1994), Ravenous would only be her fourth (and last) non-TV effort. After the film went the way of the dodo, Bird went back to television where she would remain until her untimely death last year at the age of 62. More than anything, I lament the amazing, lost films that might have followed Ravenous had the movie only been successful…or had Bird just been given another chance. The irony of the fact is that Ravenous is an exceptionally well-made film: it looks gorgeous and has more atmosphere than a bakers’ dozen of lesser movies. In a perfect world, these traits would be rewarded. In the bizarro-world of Hollywood, however, receipts are king and Ravenous never really had a chance.

And there you have it, folks: the best film that hardly anyone’s seen. Why should anyone care about a 15-year-old horror-comedy about cannibals? Well, if you’re a horror fan, the film features amazingly real and gruesome practical effects, along with one of the all-time great cinematic “monsters” and some genuinely shocking scenes. If you’re just a general fan of the cinema, Ravenous is expertly crafted, featuring beautiful cinematography, a truly unique and wonderfully fitting musical score and a superb ensemble cast. For those who like a little something to think about, Ted Griffin’s script finds some truly brilliant ways to equate Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion with the consumption of human flesh: as the settlers chewed up and spit out the remains of those who came before them, so, too, does Colqhoun plan to chew up and spit out the settlers. It’s the circle of life: it might not be pretty, but it sure does look familiar.

As a writer, I feel that one of the greatest, most important things I can possibly do is to make sure that quality films like Ravenous don’t completely fade out into obscurity. Just as I’ve fallen in love with this ramshackle little mutt of a film, so do I feel that anyone else can, with the right push. As someone who’s spent the better part of his life separating the wheat from the chaff, as far as horror films go, let me now throw the fullest recommendation possible behind Ravenous. Give it a chance and I’m pretty sure you’ll agree: there’s absolutely nothing else out there like Ravenous…and we’re all a whole lot poorer for it.

 

7/4/14: Moonshine Over My Hammy

Tags

bad cops, based on a book, based on a true story, Benoit Delhomme, bootleggers, brothers, Chris McGarry, cinema, corrupt law enforcement, Dane DeHaan, film reviews, films, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, John Hillcoat, Lawless, Mia Wasikowska, moonshine, Movies, Nick Cave, period-piece, romance, set in the 1930s, Shia LeBeouf, the Great Depression, The Proposition, The Road, Tom Hardy, voice-over narration

There are some writer/director relationships that end up bearing more interesting fruit than others and the pairing of Australian director John Hillcoat and post-punk savant Nick Cave is certainly one of those. Beginning with the brutal Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988) and continuing on into the equally raw The Proposition (2005), Hillcoat and Cave have proved a formidable team: Hillcoat is a masterful director who’s able to wring genuine pathos out of Cave’s often unpleasant, animalistic but eternally vital characters. Stylistically, Cave’s voice approximates Cormac McCarthy’s tales of moral decay, explosive violence and doomed fatalism, which are only complimented by Hillcoat’s panoramic, sweeping visuals. When it was revealed that Hillcoat and Cave’s next pairing would be an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel about his bootlegging family, The Wettest County in the World, I was interested to see how the two native Australians would be able to bring their particular vision to bear on Prohibition-era rural Virginia. Turns out, there’s still plenty of brutality to go around, although Lawless (2012) ends up feeling like a much different beast than either Ghosts…of the Civil Dead or The Proposition.

Lawless involves the various machinations of the Bondurant family: brothers Jack (Shia LaBeouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke). The brothers run one of the biggest, most impressive bootlegging operations in rural Virginia and are something of local gods, particularly when one factors in the local legend about the Bondurant’s invincibility (an interesting hint of magical realism that also informed bits of The Proposition). Brutish, laconic Forrest is the defacto leader, although youngest brother, Jack, is our entry point into the story. He’s the “new generation,” as it were, and constantly strains at the restraints that he feels are placed by his more cautious older brothers. Jack also idolizes urban gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman), a flashy, tommy-gun-wielding hothead who bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Forrest, for his part, just wants life to keep going as it has been: the family has managed to carve out their own piece of happiness and success amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and Forrest will do anything to protect their way of life.

Trouble, as it often does, ends up riding into town in the person of sleazy G-man Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce). Rakes, all ash-white complexion, plucked eyebrows and fastidious dislike of dirt and germs, is a mealy-mouthed monster and just about as far from “law and order” as a lawman can get. Together with corrupt Virgina Commonwealth Attorney, Mason Wardell (Tim Tolin), Rakes is more interested in shaking the Bondurants down and taking a cut of their profits than he is in eliminating the run of moonshine from Franklin County out to the rest of the bone-dry state. Hard-headed Forrest won’t budge, however, initiating a war between the bootleggers of Franklin County and Rakes. As the casualties build up on both sides, the polar ends of the Bondurant clan must deal with their own issues: Forrest begins a halting, tentative relationship with Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a waitress at the Bondurants’ “bar,” while Jack tries to court Bertha Minnix (Mia Wasikowska), the virginal daughter of a local fundamentalist preacher. When Forrest is ambushed and injured during a liquor delivery that Jack was supposed to back him up on, Jack decides to strike a deal with Floyd Banner, which irks Forrest and creates a division in the family. As the corrupt feds close in and their fellow bootleggers either fall in line or are outright killed, the Bondurants must make a desperate last stand to preserve their way of life. Will Forrest be able to pulverize the problem into submission or has his luck (and invincibility) finally run out?

While Lawless has moments of abject brutality that nearly rival anything in Hillcoat and Cave’s previous films (the scene where Forrest beats ten shades of red out of a pair of barroom louts with some brass knuckles manages to be both immensely horrifying and primally satisfying, while the scene where Rakes’ men tar and feather a bootlegger is just horrifying), this is a much “softer” film than either Ghosts…or The Proposition. For one thing, Hillcoat and Cave break up the brutality with the twin romance angles, which bring some delicate balance to the proceedings: while the relationship between Jack and Bertha often feels a bit silly and clichéd, there’s some genuine pathos to the tender, wounded courtship between the formerly big-city Maggie and the resolutely grim Forrest. While neither romance ever really takes center stage, they both serve as decent enough ways to break up the near constant stream of beatings (poor Jack gets wailed on at least three separate times, including once by his own brother), shootings and stabbings, along with the odd rape and tar-and-feathering here and there.

While Lawless looks absolutely gorgeous (veteran French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme provides us with some truly striking, beautiful images, as well as a really evocative way with hard shadows and dark areas), the whole film is let-down by the often out-of-place acting. Hardy, in particular, is frequently kind of awful but there isn’t a single performance in the film that feels genuine or rings true. Perhaps the award here must go Guy Pearce, however, who plays Rakes right to the cheap seats and comes up with something akin to a mustache-twirling Bond villain. LaBeouf (who can be decent-enough, given the right role) feels severely light-weight as Jack and Jason Clarke gets so little to do as “other brother” Howard that I kept wondering if most of his character arc got left on the cutting-room floor. Only Chastain (who’s always been hit-or-miss for me) acquits herself admirably as Maggie: there’s genuine pain in her performance but there’s also some steel there, too, a fighting impulse that somehow seems both more real and more feral than the one ascribed to Hardy’s character.

With more fine-tuned, realistic performances, Lawless would be a much better film, although it’s still decidedly lightweight when compared to Hillcoat and Cave’s other collaborations. There were several points during the film, not least of which during a thoroughly unnecessary closing tag, where it felt like Hillcoat lets the material get away from him and the tone had a tendency to flop violently between breezy, musical montage action scenes and moments such as the one where a character is “reverse-gutted” from tailbone to neckbone. This back-and-forth was also evident, to a much smaller degree, in The Proposition but Lawless’ tone feels less structured and more haphazard. When the film works, it works spectacularly well: the combination of the Depression-era setting, extreme violence and a rousing bluegrass-ish score never cease to get the blood-pumping. When one steps back to examine the film as a whole, however, it seems to come up a bit short. It’s a pity, really: there seems to be a really intense, gritty story locked inside but the constant overacting took me out so often that I ended up viewing events in a much more clinical manner than I would have liked. The greatest criticism that I can level against Lawless is that, for the first time, Hillcoat and Cave appear to have created something that feels disposable rather than essential. Here’s to hoping that their next partnership bears better fruit than this one.