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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Lawless

LAWLESS (John Hillcoat). 115 minutes. Opens Wednesday (August 29). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


John Hillcoat and Nick Cave are masters of brutality. The Australian director and screenwriter/composer who gave us Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, The Proposition and The Road specialize in grinding their heroes down to gristle in the service of an ambiguous goal.

But their new film, Lawless, doesn’t offer them the same sort of scale or operatic resonance. This one’s a simple 1930s crime picture, and the material is ill suited to the duo’s grandiose artistic aspirations. It might have made a great track on one of Cave’s murder-ballad albums.

Based on novelist Matt Bondurant’s family history The Wettest County In The World, it’s the true-ish story of a family of Prohibition-era moonshiners (Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke) whose comfortable Virginia life is threatened by the arrival of a big-city lawman, the crusading Charlie Rakes.

The introduction of Rakes is the first hint that Hillcoat and Cave may have overreached. Played by Guy Pearce with slicked-back hair, pigeon strut and shaved eyebrows, he’s a cartoon maniac bristling with the potential for sadistic cruelty. (This is what happens when an actor trusts his director absolutely.)

The script is similarly miscalculated, trapping the brothers’ love interests (Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain) in a clumsy Madonna-whore dichotomy and laying on the gangster clichés extra-thick whenever Gary Oldman’s Floyd Banner pays a visit to Franklin County.

On the upside, though, I’ve been waiting 20 years for someone to hit Noah Taylor (Shine, Lara Croft) with a shovel. So it’s got that going for it.

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