Review of Lawless (2012) by Jeffrey N — 08 Oct 2014

I struggled with giving "Lawless," either an arrogant display of self-importance, or naive example of big names being able to make any semi-serious film appear to be grandiose, a whole star over a half star. The only things larger than life in this absolute disastrous mess of a film are the egos behind the scenes believing they could pass this second-rate crap to the everyday audience as an independent film.

Lawless is the WORST kind of film. It pretends so much to be a powerful, strong-statement kind of indie-like film meant to be the antithesis of blockbuster, dumbed-down Hollywood garbage, like Transformers, Battleship, etc. Unfortunately, I have to actually give credit to Transformers, Battleship, and heck, even every Tyler Perry film ever made, for at least being honest in the fact that they represent and cater to the dumbest, lowest common denominator audience. No, Lawless is a snake oil salesman. Even in the trailers one believed the audience would be treated to a dark, powerful story of a family running moonshine during Prohibition and dealing with the rise of gangsters in the early 1930s. Even I was convinced, 1 hour into this nearly 2-hour waste of time, that, at some point, I'd be treated to some sort of climactic justification for sucking so bad since the opening credits.

First, a minor irritation opened the film. Hollywood...if you are going to do a period piece, use period music. Do NOT put in modern music.

Second, Nick Cave can't write screenplays. Please, Nick, just go back to playing music. The dialogue is the root cause of the failure at nearly every level in this movie.

Third, John Hillcoat can't direct. There is a reason he's attached to mostly Nick Cave material. Crap begets crap.

Fourth, Shia LaBeouf has charisma, can memorize and recite lines very well. He can't portray a Virginian hick without me constantly giggling. POOR choice. Just horrific choice. Of course, part of it is the poor dialogue, but still...

Fifth, how can this amount of talent be so wasted? Gary Oldman's character, Floyd Banner, was a completely pointless component of the movie. He appears in 3 cameos and provides not one single thing to the point of the movie. Guy Pearce is probably the most appealing performance in Lawless, but even then, every scene he's in is over-dramatized, dragged out and only serves to be grateful for his hopeful, eventual death. Tom Hardy is very good in his role as the main brother, but the fear he instills at the beginning is eventually reduced to a goofy fool. Again, the product of poor, poor writing.

None of the characters in Lawless are defined and consistently portrayed, save for Cricket Pane. The whole theme of "invincibility" seemed to drive a forced interest in this family survives the era when their "invincibility" seemed ridiculously unreal, with Tom Hardy's character in particular, deserving death many times. Shia's narration, which is expressly intended to suck the viewer into relating, empathizing or at least sympathizing with what made the family enter into moonshine running in the first place, and how that "life" changes as the world around them does.

The piss-poorly written dialogue forces incredible talent to give lukewarm, and sometimes just plain BAD, performances, it's embarrassing. Editing flaws litter the final cut resulting in 2-hours of viewer's remorse. I feel bad for the actors as they simply had no idea their back-camera staff had such little vision.