Review of Get Carter (2000) by Kenr — 17 Nov 2019

Note: 1971 vers; After seeing a trailer I resisted seeing this downbeat British so-called ‘thriller’ for many years but recently gave in. Can’t say it was worth it, if anything, it simply shows that some audiences were over-indulging in the new ’freedoms’ within production codes of the 70s.

This overly bleak, overly brutal, overly immoral product is a sign of its time and about as perverse as it could get. The main characters motivation is poorly developed and unconvincingly drawn – we have a trained killer who ruthlessly uses everyone, his friends included, to get his way.

His totally soulless, uncaring nature makes him as unlikeable as the sordid characters he’s out to kill. So, unless you are a criminal lowlife there’s not one soul you can identify with in this painful story.

His violent treatment of women is as sick as the very situations he’s supposed to be ‘defending’ them from, those being; sexual exploitation via pornography with murder thrown in - potty writing to be sure.

The moviemakers are clearly enjoying inflicting the same level of grotesqueries on women as they hypocritically claim to be ‘combating’. Beautiful Brit Ekland is again reduced to the thankless and pitiful role of a sordid gangster’s moll – no help to her career whatsoever.

The bad guys are all so obviously bad as to be borderline ‘caricatures’ - we are being manipulated into disliking them just so we can ‘enjoy’ their violent demises. This overworked story element can either be done well or end up as the silly sensationalism we see here.

Michael Cain claims his ‘super’ cool killer was based on some of his own family and friends (nice!) claiming he may have ended up being the same if not for the movies. His violent tough guy fights are so poorly choreographed and edited as to make them rather unbelievable.

‘Carter’ gets raves from some but is essentially just another sordid seventies movie like ‘Villain’ (Burton) and others in the new age ‘R’ Certificate ilk.