Lawless - total meh

A film that came out last year with a pretty decent cast, Lawless is the latest in a long line of films of 2012 that I missed because I've got much more into playing online computer games in the last 12 months.  The film tells the story of the Bondurant brothers, who were bootleggers in Virginia during the prohibition era of the early 1920s.  They ran a rural bootlegging empire that competed with the big boys of the major US cities and appeared to be largely ignored by the authorities because of its small-time and relatively unviolent nature.  That is until the uncompromising big city fed Charlie Rakes gets involved (Guy Pierce), who makes it a personal mission to take the brothers down.

I said that Lawless has a 'pretty decent' cast, and while the inclusion of Gary Oldman, Guy Pierce and Jessica Chastain gives a healthy heap of gravitas to proceedings, the problem is that they don't really get to do a lot.  Instead we have Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy (aka Bane) going full redneck as they run around the dusty scenery shooting guns, fighting with small-time criminals and buying off the cops.  I've not been impressed by LaBeouf's acting to date, and though it would be harsh to judge Hardy by the incomprehensibility of Bane in Dark Knight rises, his character here rarely gets out of a rough rumbling gurgle of speech.  Maybe that all he can do?  What I'm saying here is that I felt a little cheated out of what was a potentially brilliant cast.  Gary Oldman stands around looking menacing for a bit but has literally no impact on the story, Guy Pierce gets to be all evil - but it's nothing more than cardboard cut-out 2D evil - and Jessica Chastain just stands around cleaning glasses and looking angelic.  It's a serious waste of talent.

There's not much more that gets on my wick in films than female characters who are there for window dressing.  Here our lady characters are played by Chastain and Mia Wasikowska (she was Alice in Tim Burton's recent Alice in Wonderland).  As I've already said, Chastain does little more than have big eyes and white skin and stand around representing purity.  Wasikowska plays an innocent country girl who's there to tempt LaBeouf's character away from his family and into the non-criminal world.  I guess the point of her is to show the audience that despite being a 'master criminal', LaBeouf's character isn't actually a bad person.  Rather he's a nice normal guy driven to extremes by absurd government regulation.  Fair enough, but I can't shake the feeling that both these characters were added after the first draft of the script went through editing, and someone said "hey, there aren't any women in the film - better add some...".  And so we end up with a couple of entirely flaky female characters, ethereal-looking creatures waiting to be rescued from their torment by our 'heroes'.

The film gets bonus points for being relentless in its bloody action when the action finally gets going, there's a lot of blood and pain and general terror when people are shooting guns at each other.  This is about it though.  The superb cast is underused and the film feels like an 18-rated pantomime complete with unrealistic characters and even an "it's behind you" moment.  I'm not upset I missed this at the cinema.