Lawless (2012)

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce

Director: John Hillcoat

Genre: Crime, Drama, Western

Rating: C

I was really disappointed by this movie.  There was a lot about it that should have been good - that could have been good - but ended up sadly failing.  I don't think I've ever actually watched a Gary Oldman movie that I didn't like before, and perhaps that's where this could have gone right.  Movie makers of the world, take note: more Gary Oldman is always a good thing.

Based on the book The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant (grandson and great-nephew of the Bondurant brothers featured in both book and film) Lawless takes us to Franklin County, Virginia during the Prohibition.  The film follows three brothers, Forrest (Hardy), Howard (Clarke), and Jack (LaBeouf) as they come up against the law, primarily in the form of Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Pearce).  The Bondurants are moonshine bootleggers who refuse to give a cut of their profits to the law, causing the law to begin to try to find ways to get rid of them - typical violent ways - pushing them towards a relationship with mobster Floyd Banner (Oldman).  Along the way both Forrest and Jack find love; Forrest in former Chicago dancer Maggie Beauford (Chastain) and Jack in the form of Bertha Minnix (Wasikowska), the daughter of a preacher (who I think might've been Amish or some similar religion).

To start, Lawless has an amazing cast.  With the exception of LaBeouf, who's movies tend to get mixed reviews, and Clarke, who I really don't know from anything else, there is an amazing cast here.  I mean, Jessica Chastain alone has won or been nominated in awards for almost every movie she's been in so far - and not awards like MTV Movie Awards, I mean BAFTAs and Oscars.  And that's without taking into consideration the fact that Gary Oldman is in this movie - Gary Oldman, who was described as "one of the best actors on the planet" by film critic Peter Travers.  When you see a cast like this, you should be able to expect greatness from a movie.  Something more than just the typical shoot 'em up type film.

In many ways, this is where Lawless fails.  It's trying to be more than your typical shoot 'em up type film but fails because it doesn't properly utilize its cast.  The best parts of the movie were the scenes with Chastain and Hardy or anything with Oldman, but Lawless wanted to focus more on LaBeouf and his adventures.  I haven't read the book, so I can't say what the source material does, but the story of the quiet and rough Forrest and his relationship with the far more sophisticated Maggie is a lot more interesting than anything Jack does.

What Lawless does with Jack is nothing short of predictable.  It's not really a shoot 'em up type film, but it's stereotyped of a lot of western and crime type movies.  Watching it you know what's going to happen long before it happens - at least when it comes to Jack.  There's a bit of unpredictability with Forrester, and a lot with Howard (who really, should be described as a drunk lunatic and thus by nature of his character is unpredictable), but the other stories... I know what's going to happen. It's obvious.  I usually try to avoid going into spoilers and talking about the endings (or at least not being graphic when I do so), but I feel like with Lawless I could detail the entire movie, right down to the end, and no one would be surprised about it - well, no one who watches movies at least.  Oh, and Oldman?  Completely under utilized.  He only had a handful of scenes, maybe two of which were actual speaking parts.  I loved his performance, but there definitely wasn't enough of it.  Once again: movie makers of the world please remember you can always use more Gary Oldman.

One good thing did potentially come out of my seeing this movie.  I now have a desire to read the book that it's based on.  If it's anything like your typical book-to-movie conversion - in which a great book becomes a rather shittastic movie - I think The Wettest County in the World could be a really interesting read.  It at least appears to have gotten better reviews on Goodreads than Lawless has anywhere.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Director: Christopher Nolan
Genre: Action, Comic, Drama, Thriller
Rating: A+

"Gotham, take control... take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation! Identify yourself to the world!"

I’m going to stick this out there right at the start – my biggest problem with The Dark Knight Rises is Bane’s voice.  While I actually liked the accent overall, as well as the sheer amount of thought that Hardy appeared to put into it, there were points when it was rather screechy and as a result what Bane was saying became a bit incomprehensible.  I always got the general gist of what he was saying, but I often lost the actual words, which was a bit disappointing because in this movie Bane is more than just a brute, he’s almost Shakespearian in his way of speaking and thinking.  On the plus side of the accent, however, there were also points when he sounded like Sean Connery.  I’m just going to throw this one out there: sounding like Sean Connery is never a bad thing.  Never.

The Dark Knight Rises picks up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne (Bale) is living as a hermit, basically, in Wayne Manor, allowing Alfred (Cain) and Fox (Freeman) to basically run his operations. Bruce is still haunted by the death of Rachel and suffering from the injuries that he sustained as Batman, notably a pronounced limp. The streets of Gotham, however, have been cleaned up because of his sacrifice, and the city has gone on to worship the fallen hero, Harvey Dent – although Commissioner James Gordon (Oldman) clearly regrets his part in the cover up of Dent’s crimes and desires to come clean about them, when the time is right. The time is taken from him rather suddenly; following a series of events initiated by cat burglar Selina Kyle (Hathaway), Bruce loses his fortune and control of his company after Bane attacks Gotham’s stock exchange. Bruce decides to bring Batman out of the closet, while also moving to relinquish control of the company to Miranda Tate (Cotillard), instead of his business rival John Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn), who’s been working with Bane. Batman is unsuccessful in defeating Bane, however, who seizes control of Wayne Enterprises, turns a fusion core that they’d created into a nuclear bomb, and uses it to take over the city – unleashing chaos and entrapping the majority of the city’s police force underground. Not underground is Gordon and newly promoted special duty police officer John Blake (Gordon-Levitt), who conspire to disable the bomb and take back their city.

To be honest, going into this movie I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.  I tried to keep my expectations down; I didn't want my love for The Dark Knight to spoil this movie.  That happens so often with sequels in general.  They might be good movies on their own, but because of the build up as the result of their predecessor(s) they fall short.  I was expecting Dark Knight Rises to fall short - especially once I heard that the villains were going to be Bane and Catwoman.  Between Batman & Robin and Catwoman Bane and Catwoman were both big parts of two of the worst movies ever.  It's hard to follow up Heath Ledger's Joker with villains associated with the worst Batman movies ever.

Dark Knight Rises takes all of your fears and throws them away.  It makes you forget that the horrors of previous Batman movies never happened.  Despite Bane's occasional vocal problems he still has a flowey, poetic way about him that makes him more than just a brute.   While it takes a bit for the movie to develop, with Nolan falling back into the use of flashbacks and reused footage from Dark Knight, once it does develop you're almost completely sucked into it - asides from the occasional jarring moments when Bane becomes incomprehensible.  The thing that I really liked about this movie was that it isn't all about the action.  It's making a social commentary about anarchy, the one percent, and standing up against evil.  It was about the people of Gotham growing up and taking back their city.  Some of my favourite parts of this movie weren't the fight sequences but rather the slower and quieter montages of the characters as they come to terms with what they face.

There are problems with The Dark Knight Rises beyond just Bane's voice.  I really didn't like what they did with Alfred in this movie, it almost felt like Michael Caine was phoning in his performance here.  It seemed very un-Alfred like.  A lot of people seemed to intuitively know things in this movie, or else I just missed the explanation on how some of them knew things that they knew.  The movie was a lot slower than Dark Knight and took a bit more to get into, although as I've already mentioned this wasn't all bad.  I really enjoyed the twists that the movie brings.  I saw some of them coming from the onset, saw others just before it happened, and was caught completely unaware by others.  All in all, it was a good journey.