Review of A Most Violent Year (2014) by Eero V — 28 Jul 2015

A Most Violent Year, writer-director J.C. Chandor's third film after 2011's talky Wall Street thriller Margin Call and 2013's near-silent sailor drama All Is Lost, is yet further proof that while Chandor is capable at building and maintaining a haunting atmosphere, the stories he tells aren't very interesting.

Or then he just tells them in uninteresting manners. A Most Violent Year, set in the wintry New York of 1981 (the city's statistically most crime-filled year), tries really hard to be a sophisticated and nuanced crime drama in the manner of Sidney Lumet's crime films and Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy (not least because Oscar Isaac's character very much resembles young Al Pacino), but it is this very pursuit for sophistication that makes the film incredibly dull.

Like Margin Call and All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year isn't very eventful in terms of storytelling, but rather focuses on the characters and the extreme pressures they have to face. But all of Chandor's films have suffered from a distance they keep to their characters, leaving the audience no particular interest or emotional investment.

Despite some typically fantastic work from Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, good support from Albert Brooks and David Oyelowo, and Bradford Young's beautiful camerawork, A Most Violent Year ends up being just another flat and unexciting drama about a man slowly losing his moral while striving for the American dream.