NOT SO MUCH A "LEGEND" AS A CHANCE MISSED...

I approached this film about the infamous Kray twins with a lot of caution. Reviews about it has been mixed at best. Still I entered the film armed with a love of gangster movies and a deep appreciation of Tom Hardy’s acting talent. It cannot be that bad, I thought, probably a bit too violent or something. I love true stories – and it doesn’t come much gorier than the Krays – so all in all it should be a good watch. It very soon turned out that Tom Hardys acting was literally the only thing that was going to get me through to the end of the film. I have been flipping through some reviews of the film and it turns out that I (along with the film as it turns out) suffer a great deal from lack of knowledge of the Kray story. Well it just goes to show doesn’t it, if you don’t have a really good story, all the rest of the talent involved can only get the film so far…

Basically the film tells the story of notorious London gangsters and identical twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Told from the perspective of Frances, the wife of Reggie, the story charts the rise to power of the twins and their ultimate fall from it – the latter due in no small part to Ronnie Krays mental health issues…

Now, like I said I only know bits and pieces about the Kray story. But I do have a sense of why people would say that. Because watching the film, from a completely outside perspective as it were, I could feel bits and pieces missing although I did not know what they were. I mean, to put it in a nutshell, the film does give some small detail of the twins dealings with other gangs, their ownership of various nightclubs and casinos and hints at dealings with the police but in all honesty it shows absolutely and categorically nothing that would warrant them being accuse of having a criminal empire. I mean wheeler dealers yes. Not an empire though. Don’t get me wrong, when the time comes the film doesn’t shirk from showing violence. In fact the violence contains, in my humble opinion, some of the best bits of the film (I am the type of girl who a day later is still smiling at the line – I have a joke for you. Paranoid schizophrenic walks into a pub…- ).  Instead, the film centralizes by and large on (what else) the relationship between Reggie and Frances with Ronnie as something cross between comic relief and the impending doom that will ultimately be the undoing of them all (ultimately he is both). Again, this is a sensible choice in a way – Reggie was the more charismatic twin who was better at… Well better at being alive to be honest. But he wasn’t exactly boy scout of the year either. It enhances his struggle with his increasingly unhinged brother to have a positive light shone on him through the eyes of Frances. It harks back to that age old story of the gangster, trying to be good but ultimately being unable to avoid his past. Which would be all very well and good if we had a clearer, more grim and dire picture of what this evil empire the twins lived in was all about. Cue the complaints about how unfaithful to actual events the film is. I can sense what they left out. A couple of hinted talks with American mafia bosses and a few drunken brawls really don’t cut it.

And if the real Kray twins are left underdeveloped by the script, poor Frances definitely is. She is slightly reduced as your typical Mol. Your typical East End girl. There is clearly more to her than that, which is evident by how her story ends, but the film doesn’t do a very good job into going into detail about her. She mainly seems to exist to cast the positive light of love onto Reggie Kray. Now Reggie Kray is also, to be fair, a bit of an offshoot of a certain type – or at least in this film he is portrayed as such. He is the lovable rogue with street smarts and a flair for business. Every other British gangster film has one of them in it. The difference here of course is that Tom Hardy plays him perfectly, to an absolute T. What every other British gangster film doesn’t have, it needs to be said, is Ronnie Kray. Ronnie Kray is a paranoid schizophrenic who is left at the head of the family business when Reggie has to go into jail to serve out the tail end of a sentence. Already both eccentric and highly suspicious (all this despite medication, which he takes sporadically) I will leave you to discover how Ronnie unravels and how he brings the downfall of most if not all around him. Hardy portrays both twins with fluidity and conviction, so much so that you positively cringe at Ronnie’s antics for Reggie’s sake, completely forgetting that they are in actual fact the same person. Boy is this film a showcase of acting talent!

Violence is a strange one isn’t it… I honestly think at the end of the day it’s about striking a balance. I mean if you check out my review of The Revenant on Film Debate, you will find me complaining there was far too much violence. Now I have sort of ended up saying there is not enough. I think the problem here is that the story is in fact a well-known story of two very violent gangsters. They are almost part of the fabric of London. Turning their story into one they could have been cut out of and replaced with any gangster type from any British gangster film anywhere really, really takes something essential and important away from the films potential. We are left to the talent of Hardy, who uses these two characters a lot better in delivering the lines given to him and giving us a hint of what the film could have been… 

I FINALLY TOOK THE RIDE ON MAD MAX FURY ROAD... AND IT WAS AWESOME!

In a summer crammed full of prequels, sequels and revisits, Mad Max was possibly one of the oldest revists on the books. To balance this age factor (and thus to be able to successfully compete with the raging war of the blockbusters that is the summer cinema scene at the moment) Mad Max cranked up the visuals. I am not a person who sets great store by what a film looks like. I mean, it is important – cinema being a visual medium and all – but it is definitely not the end all and be all for me. And yet, from the moment I saw the trailer I was hooked. The story was great, what it does for feminist cinema is nothing short of amazing (we will get to that in a second) but I just want to open this review with my initial reaction – So shiny! So chrome! – to quote the film. The expectation factor will have helped no doubt but the film pretty much works on your adrenal glands from the get go, catapulting you into a glorious, meticulously constructed universe that has you gripping the armrests from the get go and does not let you go until the bitter end 2 hours later.

Now the interesting – and difficult – thing about Mad Max is that yes, it basically is a 2 hour long car chase. In a universe where all natural resources are depleted and the water wars have all but annihilated humanity, those control the resources left – water, gasoline, bullets – reign, and they reign supreme. It is a harsh world where dog eats dog  and civilisation as we know it is all but a distant fairy tale from the ancients. Max Rockatansky used to be a cop. He used to take pride in upholding the law, he is now reduced to riding through the wastelands that are now the world, battling his demons and trying to survive. On the road he comes across Imperator Furiosa the once right hand woman of Warlord Immortan Joe who has gone renegade and is trying to reach her childhood home. The trouble is, she has with her some “things” that Immortan Joe values, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to get them back. The chase is truly on – and Max is truly caught up in the middle of it all…

Ok so first and foremost the film looks glorious. It is a true blue visual extravaganza. Even for the most cynical among you (and that would be me) the films visuals alone more than justify seeing it on the biggest screen your budget will allow for.  The experience of being grabbed by the gut and being dragged willy nilly into this truly insane world is a must for any action lover. The only slight point I may make is that yes, it is slightly too long. Around the two hour mark I did begin to fidget and check my watch. This however, would have been balanced out by making the breaks in between the hardcore chase sequences a little longer. I have reasonable stamina in these matters but by the end of the second hour I was quite jittery from the sheer excess of action. But like I said, that is a side effect. Mad Max Fury Road is a visual spectacle well worth seeing.

Let us now put this fact to one side. It is, so to speak, a given circumstance. Let us move onto the other big discussion of the film – Charlize Theron and the feminism of Mad Max. Furiosa is not your average action hero. She is strong willed, bad-ass and willing to take on the world, but she is, you will have noticed, a she. Not only is she a woman – and truly realistic, fully formed female action heroes are rare enough in themselves – she is a disabled action hero. And both facts are completely incidental. In this world the fact that Furiosa is a woman or that she has lost one arm is neither here nor there. In fact this world is full of strong female characters who can easily hold their own against the men. There is, of course the matter of the wives – Furiosas cargo. Her main aim is to escape to her childhood home – the green place – and to take the five women Immortan Joe uses as breeders with her. When Max questions her about her motives, she replies – redemption. Well, one does not rise to the rank of Imperator without breaking a few eggs, so to speak. But this also constructs her as active, an author of her own destiny who makes her own decisions. And the wives, while typically beautiful and dressed, well, exactly as you would imagine they would be, they are not by any stretch of the imagination typical damsels in distress. They have their own distinct characters and storylines and they are as fully formed as secondary characters can be. They are beautiful women – and yet they are not defined solely by this fact. And all this in a hard hitting action film, where historically women are either chronically unable to cope with the action on various levels (they either need to be rescued or, like Clare in the latest box office wonder Jurassic World run around with perfect hair and high heels being very bad at trying to be active).If this is not a giant leap forward, I honestly don’t know what is.

And this is not the only deep part of the film. Yes, there is very little in the way of complex plotlines to get our teeth into but there is a lot of emotional material in there if you look. One theme that comes up repeatedly is disenchantment (spoilers upcoming, look away now if you are sensitive!). One of the most potent scenes is when Furiosa realises that the childhood home she had based her redemption and salvation on has been completely destroyed. The last dream she had, the last hope that nourished her has been destroyed completely. The same goes for Nux the warboy who goes through a slow awakening, realising that the legends of Valhalla spun by Immortan Joe are nothing more than lies meant to keep him and all around him in total submission.  In both cases, the characters reel from having their very sense of reality, truth and sense of the world destroyed. They need to reconstruct it from scratch and in both cases become more autonomous, more self-confident, better able to take their own destinies in their own hands.  It is, actually, one heck of a heavy wave as far as character development is concerned. And both Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hault who plays Nux the warboy portrays this spectacularly. Tom Hardy is a wonderful choice as the sullen Max. I have to agree with the common jokes on the matter pointing out that Hardy has hardly any lines – it is true, he barely speaks. And yet, Hardy manages to tell the story of his character without resorting to words and really does justice to the character we all know so well and love so much.

Mad Max Fury Road is, in short, a two hour long extravaganza that will blow your socks off on multiple levels. I am not a big fan of hype – well, who is – but I am glad this one lived up to the hype. It would have been a shame if a classic like Mad Max fell short of its fans dreams… 

NO INTRODUCTIONS NEEDED FOR THIS ONE - I GIVE YOU "BRONSON"

I came to watch Bronson when I was in a very peculiar mood indeed. You know “those” days, you may have got out of bed the wrong side, something may have gone very wrong in the office, or everything may have gone slightly wrong everywhere… In short, you’ve had enough, your nerves are in shreds and you feel rather belligerent and at odds with the world. Not, you may observe, the best frame of mind for a film. Not Bronson. If I had to describe my experience of it, I would use one word only: cathartic.
Which brings me to my disclaimer. Be warned, Bronson is not for the faint of heart or stomach. The level of violence portrayed is positively Tarantinian (and if that isn’t a word it damn well should be!) and the way the said violence is portrayed can be downright disturbing. Personally, this was not so much of a problem for me, I am a massive Tarantino fan, it should be said. But you may not be. So be warned.
Bronson is the true story of Michael Peterson, or rather his alter-ego, Charles Bronson, Britain’s most famous and most violent prisoner. We follow Bronson shocking career from prison to a facility for the criminally insane, to the outside world and back “inside” again. Not only do we get a blow by blow (very literally) account, it is Bronson himself who is narrating it! (well, not the real Bronson but Tom Hardy does such a spectacular job of the part you could be forgiven for being fooled) Thus we travel all the way into Bronson’s world, his psyche. And the fact that he actually is criminally insane makes for very interesting scenery indeed.
So far, Nicholas Wendig Refyn’s Bronson has taken Sundance, Rotterdam, London and Dublin film festivals by storm, and I can quite see why. And if you ever get round to watching this film, within 30 seconds of meeting Tom Hardy’s version of Bronson, I guarantee it, so will you…