Outlaw (2007)

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Sgt. Danny Bryant comes home from a tour of duty in Iraq to find that things aren't what they once were. A gang of thugs has moved into the neighbourhood, and his wife is with another man. Gene Dekker, is beaten up by thugs, and he sets out to get revenge on the men. Terence Manning, a gangster of London's underworld, is currently on trial, with lawyer Cedric Munroe heading the prosecution's legal team. Manning's men attack both Munroe's wife, and persuade Munroe's bodyguard Walter not to intervene. The men from an alliance, and set out to even the score against those who wronged them, though their contempt for the law puts them outside the lines of conventional justice.....Yes, it's a trashy, exploitative movie, but its one of my all time favourite guilty pleasures. And it's because its starts off silly, goes a little cuckoo in the middle, and then, the third act is just beyond, beyond bonkers.But Love is one of this directors that doesn't really do anything other than over the top British bulldog B-movies. And they are all full of another word beginning with B, but with his films, you can just switch off, and forget everything else for ninety or so minutes.The cast are all fine, and do what you would expect them all to do in films like this. Bean meets all the rest of the group whilst really angry, and this anger makes them angry, and Bob Hoskins is there to overlook everything.Imagine The Avengers after fifteen pints of strong Lager, and Pie and Chips?, then this is your movie.It's pretty visceral stuff, the camera work tries to make it look realistic, but it looks like it must have been cold on the day.To say the third act is beyond ridiculous is an understatement, but by the time it arrives, you couldn't care less.If you like this type of film, its a riot,if you don't, fair enough.

"Outlaw" is a British "Death Wish" revisited for the twenty-first century, with the difference that Michael Winner's film featured one single vigilante, whereas "Outlaw" features a whole gang of them, even though the title is singular rather than plural. All the members of the gang have, in one way or another, been victims of crime or have reason to believe that justice in Britain is not being administered fairly. Led by Danny Bryant, a former soldier, they form their own vigilante army to take on the nation's criminals, and their exploits bring them to the attention of the media, who dub them "The Outlaws". Their main target is Terry Manning, a gangster whose associates were responsible for the death of the wife of one of the group's members."Death Wish", made in 1974 and set in New York, was very much a film of its place and time. The seventies were a period when New York was gaining an unenviable reputation as a lawless, crime-ridden city. (Today the city has lower levels of homicide and violent crime in general than most major American cities). The actions of Charles Bronson's hero Paul Kersey therefore struck a chord with many New Yorkers and other Americans concerned about what they saw as the breakdown of law and order."Outlaw" does not reflect its place and time in the same way. It is set in the United Kingdom of 2007, the year it was made. Bryant claims that contemporary Britain is more violent than Afghanistan or Iraq, both countries in which he has served, and the London we see in this film has effectively been turned into a war zone by criminal gangs. The police are generally portrayed as hopelessly corrupt and in league with the criminals they are supposed to be fighting. (One of the vigilantes, Walter Lewis, is himself a policeman, one of the few honest men on the force, who has turned to vigilantism because he is sickened by his corrupt colleagues allowing notorious villains to go free. His main function is to provide Bryant and the others with information on their targets).The trouble is that few modern Britons, unless they have a particularly morbid fear of crime, would recognise this as an accurate portrait of their country. Although some elements within the media have tried to sensationalise the issue, crime rates have actually been falling in recent years, and although there is undoubtedly police corruption in Britain it is nowhere near as pervasive as depicted here.The film is at places difficult to understand and there are a number of plot-holes; it is never, for example, made clear just why Bryant decides to spare the life of Ian Furlong, one of Manning's most vicious sidekicks, and then hangs Simon Hillier, one of his own gang, for insubordination."Death Wish" certainly had its faults, but it was in some ways a professional, well-made and well-photographed piece of filmmaking. "Outlaw" is very different in its visual style, with a dull, washed-out palette (many of the scenes take place at night or in dim light) and with some very shaky camera-work; presumably the reason was to give it a grim, unattractive look to match its subject-matter. The standard of acting varies; the best on display is from Sean Bean, an actor who can be a very good one if cast in a better film than this one. I was surprised to see another distinguished British actor, Bob Hoskins, cast as Lewis, largely because at 65 he seemed too old to play a serving police officer.My main reason for disliking the film, however, was the stance it took as regards its subject-matter. It might have been better if it had been set in some future dystopia, but writer/director Nick Love went for a contemporary setting. This affects the way we view Bryant and his colleagues. Vigilantism might be justified in a society where law and order has collapsed and ordinary citizens have no other means of self-defence or of obtaining justice against those who wrong them. In a modern Western society, however, vigilantes are little better than gangsters whose activities make them part of the problem of lawlessness, not part of the solution. Love, however, comes perilously close to making his "outlaws" seem like heroes standing up for the Common Man against both the authorities and the villains whom the authorities allow to flourish. 4/10

Nick Love's previous films The Football Factory and The Business appealed to the 'Nuts' and 'Zoo'-reading male in their first flush of testosterone. Yet for all its flashes of brutalism, Outlaw feels defanged and debooted, reflecting Love's drift into middle-age, with middle-class concerns. As he says of the film, "It could have had the lads treatment (but) I'm getting older. I think it's made in a more mature way." And with age, comes, well, not so much maturity, responsibility, or experience, as fear. Having titillated his audience with terrace thuggery and dispatches from the Costa Del Crime, Love appears concerned that his audience may have taken his flirtation with criminality seriously. What to do? Well, there's only one sort of language these horrible hoodies understand. Beat them up! That's the position former paratrooper Danny Bryant (Bean) adopts on returning from a tour of Iraq, emotionally wounded by a war nobody wanted and appalled by the state of the country he left behind. "It's almost worse here" he exclaims. "They go around wrecking lives and when they get caught they get a slap on the wrist." Determined to do something about it, he contacts some like-minded, emasculated souls, two of whom flank Bean on the movie poster in some representation of the Three Ages of Geezerdom. Danny Dyer's Gene has been previously humiliated with a road rage kicking in front of his bride-to-be; Lennie James's weedy barrister Cedric is under pressure from henchmen to drop a case against a drug baron; and Rupert Friend's traumatised Cambridge student Sandy has seen his attackers released from prison before he's fully recovered from his injuries.Bringing up the rear is creepy security guard Simon (Harris, in Gareth from 'The Office' mode) and Walter (Hoskins), an embittered, formerly straight-arrow copper, whose inside knowledge of CCTV cameras will prove invaluable for what they're about to do.Simply, as explained in a prolonged rant that resembles a 'Daily Mail' editorial penned by Death Wish's Paul Kersey, they want to get rid of "the paedophiles, the scum, the dealers, the prostitutes." Far from bringing down new Labour (or those poor, exploited prostitutes), the newly-trained dirty half-dozen mostly focus their attention on dispatching the drug baron's incompetent henchmen; a shame, as it would be fascinating to see how far they'd go. Viagra spammers? People who don't say 'thank you' when you hold the door open for them? They get chased by the corrupt police, feted by the media, and implode through in-fighting (always a risk, especially when your security guard turns out to be a neo-Nazi).Hardly original, Outlaw treads in the booted footprints of previous veteran-turned-vigilante movies (an cultural knock-on of messy conflicts like Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Iraq), from Taxi Driver to The Exterminator, For Queen And Country and Dead Man's Shoes. It also owes a largish debt to De Palma's The Untouchables, particularly where Hoskins' character is concerned.Love still hasn't managed to shrug off Guy Ritchie's influence: the over and under-cranked photography; the self-consciously laddish dialogue. And from Love, who deals in the cinema of the pre-emptive strike, it's also unusually leaden; a eulogy looking for a war. Still, Dyer (Love's working-class alter-ego and muse) remains a very watchable, if one-note performer; and there is, at least, an occasional wry humour here: "I'm going to the toilet - try not to kill anyone while I'm away." Attempting to draw big thematic parallels between Britain's internal and external affairs, between aggressive foreign policy and an aggressive homegrown underclass, Outlaw actually reveals rather more about the concerns of nervous filmmakers, caught between a desire to please their core audience and an increasing unwillingness to return their phone calls.

Recap: A few honest men that feel betrayed by society form a loose group that is out for revenge. Fed information by a disgruntled old police officer that is fed up with corrupt officers that is promoted before him their target becomes those criminals that the has escaped too easy from the law. Their prime target is Manning, a known crime lord. The men is led by an old army ranger, Bryant, but the rest is ordinary men. Dekker and Mardell wants revenge from beatings, Munroe wants revenge after two hit men murdered his pregnant wife, and Hillier is just longing for violence. The brutal ways of the group tear at them and soon they find themselves under attack, both from within, from Manning and from the police.Comments: A decent action movie with a little different set up. It is pretty brutal and honest and doesn't use any typical action movie tricks. There is no extra explosions or glorified violence. Instead it tries to show the ugly truth. So, unlike other action movies, the action scenes is nothing you really enjoy, and I suppose you are not supposed to.What is interesting is that there is really no difference in the criminals hits and Bryant's group's revenge. Both play equally dirty and their violence is equally summarily and brutally distributed. And that may be the movies biggest trouble. As realistic that may be, and even if that might be director Love's intention to show that violence is violence irrespective of the perpetrators intentions, this might be the biggest fault. Because I had big problems to feel any connection or any sympathy for or with any of the characters. I certainly didn't feel for the criminals but couldn't find any reason to feel for or root for the avengers either. There was just two groups that fought it out between them and the one wasn't better than the other.And when there is no real interest in any of the characters there is hard to get that real interest in the movie. I didn't find it anyway. It's a good idea but might have been done better if done differently. Or it is a message that need to be shown in a world that feels like it grows increasingly violent world, but it wasn't that funny to watch.5/10