Review: Outlaw

Little more than a.n.other stereotypical Brit gangster film, this poorly-paced actioner tries for originality by looking at the world from the victims' point of view. Sort of.

From the montages of news clips and shots of hoodies hanging around the streets, through those other recent staples of Brit cinema, the washed-out colour and too much hand-held photography, we are given a clear picture of the feral, thug-controlled society in which we now live. Into this picture of urban blight come the stories of our characters. Danny Dwyer's soon-to-be-married City wide-boy is successful, reasonably wealthy and living well, but is bullied at work and having violent dreams. Sean Bean's taciturn soldier who returns from the war to find the locks changed and his wife shacked up with another man is played with his usual intensity but is still little more than a cypher. He ends up in an hotel where the creepy, racist security guard has rigged his own cameras inside the rooms.

Somehow, Dyer knows the Security guard as 'someone who can get things done.' Even before said character has met Bean's who is the one who actually does the doing.

As things go on we discover that few of the characters are any different from the thugs they target. Most have dark secrets in their past and they turn on one another very quickly.

It is this film's one saving grace that the characters are not sympathetic and that their violent vigilantism is neither heroic not successful. It suffers, though, from poor plotting, little cohesion and thoroughly stupid dream-sequence in which Dyer is chased and attacked bya gang of thugs. That this later turns out to be a premonition of sorts and features people he could not have met, but who did attack another member of the group is totally pointless and out of place in this film.

Only one police officer, the out-of-touch and out-of-date Bob Hoskins, is shown as being anything other than a corrupt, self-serving bureaucrat in the pay of gangsters. It is offensive to imply that, rather than deal with violent thugs on the street, they can be turned into an armed hit-squad for a mobster.

This film is a sadly missed opportunity. The montage scenes of the brutal cess-pit into which our society seems to be descending are excellent. The smug, sneering thugs, the petty violence and yobbery depicted are perfect representations of certain areas and attitudes all-too prevalent today.
I think this was meant to be and attempt to look at how being surrounded and confronted by this behaviour and the way we seem to be geared up to protect the criminal at the expense of the ordinary person but it misses the mark by a country mile. By making the protagonists as bad sa the thugs to begin with, a chance to see how an everyman pushed over the edge is affected by descending into the mire. Too many characters dissipate the effects and not really getting to know most of them makes it hard to care about any of them. Only the lawyer is seen to be truly affected, tempted and to have any real journey or moral dilemma. Had the script concentrated on him rather than Dyer's irritating, whiny city-boy this could have been an outstanding film. As it is, it is a tedious mess that ignores the story and simply glories in its brutal violence.