Lawless (2012), John Hillcoat
- IMDB.COM: Rating: 7.3 (90,000+ votes); Metascore: 58 (35+ critics)
- ROTTEN TOMATOES: Tomatometer: 67% (132-197)
- TOP7 NEWSPAPERS: 54 AVG, no 4-star reviews
Although Lawless was released in August last year, I needed another film from 2012 to post its review along with The Place Beyond the Pines as an unsuccessful attempt at crime genre that puts the family at its center. If you make a list of pros and cons about Lawless, you’ll find that the pluses outnumber the minuses, and not by a slight margin. The film’s casting & acting are superb, Delhomme’s cinematography captures the Prohibition atmosphere as well as any Roaring Twenties classic and that raw, uncensored violence that is director John Hillcoat’s trademark evokes the brutal reality of inflicted pain from The Proposition.
Alas, in every system there’s a hierarchy; not all the segments of the pyramid possess the same weight. And for the cinema, just like for any other art, content, form and function stand second to none. Unfortunately, Lawless never fully realizes any of these three dimensions. The key problem that stunted its growth and irreparably damaged the overall quality of the film rests on its problematic identity. With his misplaced narrative in the form of prologue/epilogue, Hillcoat unnaturally forces his framed story to stretch through time and work on the purpose of his protagonist’s (Hardy) life, somehow overlooking the fact that those two have nothing in common and are actually excluding one another. The director is infatuated with making his film look epic – tendency the Coen brothers actually realized with Miller’s Crossing – that he fails to develop the main plot to its full extent. The result is not a bad movie, but one which we inadvertently tend to forget, as expressed in a regularly applied memory game, “What was it about, again?”
EUPHORICFX GRADE:
