: Lawless
I skipped this in the theaters as it didn’t seem my cup of tea, but it turned out to be pretty good. In the glimpses I’d gotten I’d thought it was a Western, but it’s about hillbilly bootleggers during Prohibition. There’s a lot of horrific violence, but everything’s stylized and dramatic, and the action is pretty entertaining.
There’s a lot I didn’t like: the overdone accents are almost intelligible (I had to frequently rewind and read the closed captions to figure out what characters were saying), and the music is absolutely atrocious. (I guess it’s supposed to be topical somehow, but I just found it annoying and off-putting, though I did like the one song during the closing credits that seemed to be a real hillbilly singing.) Some of the performances are just too over-the-top and weird (Guy Pearce as the bad lawman is just bizarre).
The story itself was more interesting than I expected, about a shy younger brother who is too frightened to kill and his deadly older brother whom everyone fears, and how the younger boy ends up taking the reins of the family business and prospers.
In short, I didn’t expect to like this much but I did. I found myself caring for the brothers despite their criminal enterprise, and I liked the ending. Worth seeing, though be warned it is pretty brutal.
Topic: [/movie] |
