Outlaw (2007)

So much average

Memorable, crazy movie

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Quite simply a terribly constructed movie. So many plot holes and inexplicable character actions that it completely ruins what *could* have been a half decent British "hard man" movie.Whilst I appreciate that you don't necessarily need to actually see everything happen it would still be good to know what conversation occurred between Bean and the Security Guard guy to make Bean want to "train" (although he doesn't) this "gang". Or how the bad guys knew Hoskins was involved - this was intimated but not explained.We later find out, from a news report, that Bean was court martialled out of the Army but I must have missed the moment when this was explained.It doesn't even work on an ephemeral action level. For a trained soldier, a Para no less, Bean isn't that good at fighting and the rest of them are worse.Unless you genuinely don't have anything better to do then don't bother. It was that bad I was moved to come here to warn people.

I had high hopes for this one, I loved the director's previous work the football factory and this had a great cast, hoskins, bean, dyer etc. However, Director Nick Love does a very poor job here, he's trying to create a satire on modern Britain and throw in a lot of violence to make it a present dat "death wish" vigilante movie but that fails on both counts. Character development is appalling, I was scratching my head here more than I've ever done in a movie, some of the plot inconsistencies were just laughable, other posters have mentioned the specifics so I wont go into details here. Love should stick to his bread and butter of football hooligans, he went over his head here and created an instantly forgettable film.

Nick Love's previous films The Football Factory and The Business appealed to the 'Nuts' and 'Zoo'-reading male in their first flush of testosterone. Yet for all its flashes of brutalism, Outlaw feels defanged and debooted, reflecting Love's drift into middle-age, with middle-class concerns. As he says of the film, "It could have had the lads treatment (but) I'm getting older. I think it's made in a more mature way." And with age, comes, well, not so much maturity, responsibility, or experience, as fear. Having titillated his audience with terrace thuggery and dispatches from the Costa Del Crime, Love appears concerned that his audience may have taken his flirtation with criminality seriously. What to do? Well, there's only one sort of language these horrible hoodies understand. Beat them up! That's the position former paratrooper Danny Bryant (Bean) adopts on returning from a tour of Iraq, emotionally wounded by a war nobody wanted and appalled by the state of the country he left behind. "It's almost worse here" he exclaims. "They go around wrecking lives and when they get caught they get a slap on the wrist." Determined to do something about it, he contacts some like-minded, emasculated souls, two of whom flank Bean on the movie poster in some representation of the Three Ages of Geezerdom. Danny Dyer's Gene has been previously humiliated with a road rage kicking in front of his bride-to-be; Lennie James's weedy barrister Cedric is under pressure from henchmen to drop a case against a drug baron; and Rupert Friend's traumatised Cambridge student Sandy has seen his attackers released from prison before he's fully recovered from his injuries.Bringing up the rear is creepy security guard Simon (Harris, in Gareth from 'The Office' mode) and Walter (Hoskins), an embittered, formerly straight-arrow copper, whose inside knowledge of CCTV cameras will prove invaluable for what they're about to do.Simply, as explained in a prolonged rant that resembles a 'Daily Mail' editorial penned by Death Wish's Paul Kersey, they want to get rid of "the paedophiles, the scum, the dealers, the prostitutes." Far from bringing down new Labour (or those poor, exploited prostitutes), the newly-trained dirty half-dozen mostly focus their attention on dispatching the drug baron's incompetent henchmen; a shame, as it would be fascinating to see how far they'd go. Viagra spammers? People who don't say 'thank you' when you hold the door open for them? They get chased by the corrupt police, feted by the media, and implode through in-fighting (always a risk, especially when your security guard turns out to be a neo-Nazi).Hardly original, Outlaw treads in the booted footprints of previous veteran-turned-vigilante movies (an cultural knock-on of messy conflicts like Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Iraq), from Taxi Driver to The Exterminator, For Queen And Country and Dead Man's Shoes. It also owes a largish debt to De Palma's The Untouchables, particularly where Hoskins' character is concerned.Love still hasn't managed to shrug off Guy Ritchie's influence: the over and under-cranked photography; the self-consciously laddish dialogue. And from Love, who deals in the cinema of the pre-emptive strike, it's also unusually leaden; a eulogy looking for a war. Still, Dyer (Love's working-class alter-ego and muse) remains a very watchable, if one-note performer; and there is, at least, an occasional wry humour here: "I'm going to the toilet - try not to kill anyone while I'm away." Attempting to draw big thematic parallels between Britain's internal and external affairs, between aggressive foreign policy and an aggressive homegrown underclass, Outlaw actually reveals rather more about the concerns of nervous filmmakers, caught between a desire to please their core audience and an increasing unwillingness to return their phone calls.

Recap: A few honest men that feel betrayed by society form a loose group that is out for revenge. Fed information by a disgruntled old police officer that is fed up with corrupt officers that is promoted before him their target becomes those criminals that the has escaped too easy from the law. Their prime target is Manning, a known crime lord. The men is led by an old army ranger, Bryant, but the rest is ordinary men. Dekker and Mardell wants revenge from beatings, Munroe wants revenge after two hit men murdered his pregnant wife, and Hillier is just longing for violence. The brutal ways of the group tear at them and soon they find themselves under attack, both from within, from Manning and from the police.Comments: A decent action movie with a little different set up. It is pretty brutal and honest and doesn't use any typical action movie tricks. There is no extra explosions or glorified violence. Instead it tries to show the ugly truth. So, unlike other action movies, the action scenes is nothing you really enjoy, and I suppose you are not supposed to.What is interesting is that there is really no difference in the criminals hits and Bryant's group's revenge. Both play equally dirty and their violence is equally summarily and brutally distributed. And that may be the movies biggest trouble. As realistic that may be, and even if that might be director Love's intention to show that violence is violence irrespective of the perpetrators intentions, this might be the biggest fault. Because I had big problems to feel any connection or any sympathy for or with any of the characters. I certainly didn't feel for the criminals but couldn't find any reason to feel for or root for the avengers either. There was just two groups that fought it out between them and the one wasn't better than the other.And when there is no real interest in any of the characters there is hard to get that real interest in the movie. I didn't find it anyway. It's a good idea but might have been done better if done differently. Or it is a message that need to be shown in a world that feels like it grows increasingly violent world, but it wasn't that funny to watch.5/10