Review of Dead Man Down (2013) by Simon M — 04 Jun 2013

Dead Man Down... What the hell does that even mean!? I get 'dead man', and 'man down' is a traditional battlefield cry for help, but together? I'm stumped, and this ambiguous title only goes to highlight the main problem with this movie: that this is essentially two conjoined stories which really should have been separated at birth.

This super serious movie stars the super serious Colin Farrell and the also super serious Noomi Rapace as two super serious people with a mountain of super serious secrets. From the moment they catch the other's despondent gaze, a blossoming relationship forms as he comes over to her house for cookies, and she visits him for... Glasses of water. However, the aforementioned secrets begin to rear their ugly heads as light is cast on both Farrell's illegal dealings and Rapace's lust for revenge. Can they sweep out the skeletons from their respective closets before driving off into the sunset?

Dead Man Down is brought to us by director Niels Arden Oplev, the Danish guy behind the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film of 2009, and as with many international directors his introduction to Hollywood isn't a memorable one. Farrell is a henchman, a crony if you will, for some mob boss (Terrence Howard) involved in the narcotics business. Not only does he attempt to downplay his Irish accent (which is semi-successful), but his character is actually a Hungarian who is also trying to hide his native tongue. The result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a tongue which is as funny as it is distracting.

But Farrell's amalgamation of a dialect is merely the tip of this iceberg of problems masquerading as a film. Dead Man Down is simply trying to be two things: on the one hand, we get a gritty crime thriller about the trials and tribulations of the trigger-happy underground lawlessness, while on the other we're treated to a fledgling romance between the two neighbours. Apart they could have been great, had each story been given more of a polish and the scripts rewritten, but as it is the film remains a jambalaya that disappoints rather than dazzles.

There's a fairly awesome shootout right near the beginning, but from there the story devolves into a decidedly uninteresting spiel about death threats and Farrell's backstory that moves at a snail's pace. Couple this with the tiresome love plot involving Rapace, a young lady apparently horribly mauled in an accident (yet who is still ridiculously attractive; the wounds look like a Henna tattoo). Literally the only sliver of entertainment in this film comes from Rapace's French mother, played by Isabelle Huppert, a hilariously nosey deaf woman. As the sole source of comic relief, without her this film would be zero fun whatsoever.

Erratic pacing, continuity errors (Rapace claims she can no longer work, yet she works just fine later on), needlessly convoluted plot threads (death threats, phone-tapping, jigsaw puzzle pieces) and a distinct lack of fun all combine to make Dead Man Down a total drag. I'm lucky I had a coffee beforehand, because otherwise I'd have been asleep.