Don't want to spoil the full review I should be posting of the film to the
Uppers site, but initial thoughts are that it was a little lacking -
fantastic attention to detail (you've got to admire a film that mentions
Deram within the first 20 lines, a chase scene to 'Bert's Apple Crumble',
and a club scene that included Tulu Babies 'Hurtin Kind'). The acting was
great, with Malcolm McDowell playing a throroughly unpleasant aged gangster
in the modern scenes, and the guy playing his younger self had obviously
studied a lot of McDowell's 60s performances - and James Fox in Performance.
It was completely removed from the usual latter-day crime caper films we're
suffering a glut of over here - it's inspiration is much more the gritty end
of the spectrum - 'Villain', 'Get Carter', 'Clockwork Orange', or the first
half of 'Performance' being examples, with a dash of Ripley styled
suggestive male jealousy, and some truly nasty violence that had several
people walking out of the cinema (my mate thought it was gratutious, that it
made the main character a psychopath - I thought that was the whole point,
like Carter, showing the unpleasantness of these people). The main problem
was that it seemed to lack a soul - I guess the comparison would be bands
that perfectly reproduce 60s work without putting their own personality into
it - it never excedes it's influences (except in violence and profanity),
and unlike them it's not boundary breaking. On the other hand, I'd still say
it's worth seeing, because there's so many nice touches from our point of
view (a particularly nice one is when a scooter goes by in the background,
mostly out of shot - you don't see the rider - rather than making sure you
have some guy with a parka riding a fully kitted out bike to remind you it's
a 60s film).
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