Dir.
Nick Love, UK, 2007, 105 mins
Cast: Sean Bean, Danny Dyer, Rupert Friend, Sean Harris,
Lennie James, Bob Hoskins
Review by Zoë J Griffiths
Sergeant Danny Bryant (Bean) is a veteran
paratrooper on his way home from Iraq. When he gets back
to his housing estate, it seems things have changed. The
locks, for starters. Through the window, he sees his wife's
affections have moved elsewhere. In the street outside, a
gang of 'youths' demonstrate what seems to be a lack of respect
for their elders and betters. In the dodgy hotel Danny decides
to move into, slimy security guard Simon Hillier (Harris)
further hammers the point home, showing off his salacious
CCTV set-up to the ex-para. In every room in the hotel, people
are doing bad things; selling bad goods, handling bad guns,
taking bad drugs, having bad sex.
This is Britain in 2007; the country has gone to the dogs.
What Danny sees is a country he hardly recognises any more
but one which some could reasonably argue we're hurtling
headfirst towards - a place where thugs, violence, racism,
corruption and unchecked social degradation reign supreme.
We've seen vigilante movies before and Outlaw does slightly
sidestep the stereotypical image of the avenging hero in
that the perpetrators are shown to be human (or subhuman,
in some cases). With today's society growing more and more
disaffected by Blair's Britain, the well-thumbed cliches
resonate more than they should and the themes of the film
should provoke debate. However, whether that debate turns
to action based on Outlaw would be a worrying scenario: this
is a Nick Love film, remember, and that always means tough
gritty violence in the extreme.
What does let the film down is the
plot, 'connected' by a pretty unconvincing chain of loosely
linked events. Under the collective banner 'Man, I've been
wronged!', the Outlaws set about punishing the people who
hurt them – the
justice system having gone to the same dogs as the rest of
Britain.
Office worker, Gene (Dyer) is a victim of road-rage. Fey
Cambridge uni student, Sandy (Friend) complete with prerequisite
flowing locks and a baby face, has been beaten up, but his
attackers were permitted to go free. Dignified, Black, well-to-do
barrister, Cedric (James) is widowed when the drug baron
he's prosecuting arranges for his heavily pregnant wife to
be stabbed, through the stomach, no less.
The same dodgy security guard now trying to befriend soldier
Danny was once represented by Cedric. Danny's former commanding
officer turns out to be the father of the effeminate Sandy.
These tenuous connections are enough, it seems, for disgruntled
policeman Walter Lewis (Hoskins) to start manipulating a
gang ready to stand around in gyms listening to Danny rallying
his 'troops', start on anonymous gangs in pubs and drive
around the countryside looking for revenge.
The idea that barrister Cedric and uni student Sandy would
just take up arms with the clearly unstable, ignorant and
slightly scary Simon just stretches the imagination a little
too far. Also, the different motives of the Outlaws sit a
little uncomfortably together, the result being confusion
over the different revenge moves. The murder of Cedric's
pregnant wife is really horrible. Do the perpetrators deserve
the same treatment as the blokes that beat up Gene, after
he bumps their car? And what's behind Simon's taking up of
arms, besides the fact that he clearly 'doesn't fit in',
was probably bullied at school, and has a bit of a soft spot
for guns in his soft head?
The threads holding the group together are ultimately too
weak to keep the audience gripped and although the performances
are quite watchable, the characters have a tendency to slip
into caricature. However, what you see is what you get with
Love and he knows what his audience likes - let's just hope
that what we see is not what we get in the Britain of the
not-so-distant-future.
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