RIP Michael Clarke Duncan

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Lawless review



Lawless is easily the hardest movie I've had to review while running this site. It's definitely not good, but it never quite crosses the boundaries into flat-out terrible either.

The story follows a family of brothers who are bootlegging out in the boonies of the Appalachia's in the 1930's during the height of prohibition. And while the acting in the film is very well done, the story is such a mess and the characters are so shoddily written that everyone is just a cardboard cutout caricature to the point where you could literally use one word to describe any one of them.

Shia Labouf's youngest of the brothers character, Jack: COWARD.

Tom Hardy's oldest of the brothers, Forrest: TOUGH.

The middle brother, Howard played by Jason Clark: DRUNK.

True, I'm generalizing and while some could find more depth behind this film I believe they'd be fishing in a shallow pond and turning their minnow's into heavy bass within the temples of their own delusional minds.

Beyond the lack of characterization there is also a lack of story. This is highly problematic for such a tale as Lawless. You see, in a gangster period-piece like this there usually isn't going to be much of a plot. Thanks to such character-driven gems like the Godfather and Goodfellas, Hollywood gears these movies to run more on performances and shocking scenarios more than anything else. Which is truly sad because I think a plot-driven gangster movie could be just as, if not, more entertaining. Alas, while Lawless has some good moments and some really great actors doing some interesting things occasionally it's mostly smoke and mirrors. The dialogue is minimal, the action is few and far between and with the final nail in the coffin being bad characterization in a flick that has nothing else going for it, well that adds up to a bunch of people standing, sitting, or walking around doing nothing and talking about nothing. This speaks to a bad script.



However, we can't solely blame the writer for the flaws in this movie. Because the other main problem is that this is one of the more disjointed flicks I've seen in a long time. It jumps around from scene to scene almost without logic and seems to cross time without any sense of the stuff passing. Part of the reason we never get a strong sense of what's at stake or who these characters are is because we never spend enough time with any one of them to understand anything more than the basics. It's almost like someone took an exciting chapter in a family's life and then just made a movie about the uninteresting times like when they were on the crapper or when they played an exciting round of spades...actually that would be probably more interesting than half the stuff we get to see in the movie.

And while I have truly come to love Shia Labouf as an actor, he's incredibly overused and wasted in this role. Here we come to the heart of the problem with Lawless...it's focused on the wrong brother/character. On one hand the film seems to try and be an ensemble piece, but as I stated above, it never stays with characters long enough to strengthen that theory, instead it always jumps back to Labouf - the least interesting and most annoying of the brothers and characters in the movie. While Shia does great acting in the flick, he's playing a stupid, cowardly, and shameful character that is unlikable, unrelatable, and uninteresting so while it's great that he's playing that part convincingly, it's still not a character I'm remotely interested in spending time with.

As an example of the lost opportunities of this flick, I give you a scene where we follow a drunk Shia Labouf into a church where his extremely religious love interest is with her entire family and congregation. He sits down, there is a feet washing ceremony (I don't know, just go with it), he starts to get sick and stumbles outside. Wow...great scene. Now contrast that with this: Fairly early on in the movie, Tom Hardy's character is attacked, once he's out of the hospital and ready to strike back we don't get to go with him. He goes after the guys who put him in the hospital without Shia, hence without us because we have more interesting things to do like watch as Labouf's character attempts to hit on this girl who we don't really know and absolutely don't care about.

I only use these scenes to contrast each other to prove a point. Gangster films are supposed to be violent and shocking. They have to be in order to be interesting - especially when we lack strong plot and/or strong characterization. They are stories about violent, ruthless men basically going to war with each other. But Lawless is constantly pulling it's punches - hardcore. It seems to constantly avoid showing us the consequences of these characters actions and instead have us follow the Adventures of the Dimwit Bootlegger with Shia Labouf! I get what Lawless was attempting to do. I get that it's supposed to be a study on violence within a family unit and the affects of money, greed, power, pride, blah, blah, blah. I get it, I really do. But the problems with that are we have a shit script and we follow the most annoying character on the screen while we ignore the most interesting character's.


Barely in the movie, CRIMINALLY underused.

We seem to live in a time where great performances are appreciated more than anything else but people seem to be confused on what a great performance is. First of all, I gotta say flat-out that anyone can stand there and be broodingly silent while they slowly read their lines and look around awkwardly and intensely. THAT is not what makes a good performance. And I'm not trying to knock on any one particular actor here, but seriously, acting aloof and deep is not hard and it's not the same as turning out a good performance. Right off the bat you have to have good material. Your character's should be interesting and have some depth to them. The story should also be good so that we know what the motivations are for everyone within. Think back to some of the great all-time performances, you know what they all tend to have in common? They were good movies. Good characters in good movies.

Lawless lacks that, don't let anyone tell you anything differently.


5 / 10

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