Cynical Cinema

There have been many little indie films that have done well with the theme of vigilante justice.  And some bigger-budget ones that haven’t done so well.  The main reason the big budget ones have done poorly (aside from the amazing Death Wish 4, which arms Charles Bronson with a rocket launcher at what appears to be a retirement home) is that they are merely jacked-up versions of the low-budget movies.  And the low-budget movies usually work because vigilante justice is something that is best served in grainy, gritty film-making.  The best of the bunch was Death Wish, which was the first of it’s kind and really changed the genre.  The next-best was Boondock Saints, which was incredibly stylish and managed to infuse Tarantino-esque cool, great lead performances, and some quality humour into a movie that changed the genre further.

Then there were the also-rans.  A ton of also-rans.  Death Wish 2, 3, and 5.  Hero Wanted, Death Sentence, and The Brave One.  And many, many more.  Outlaw fits somewhere in the middle, and at the same time it manages to change the genre once more.  A tight, gritty little film out of Britain, Outlaw is a film about five people who have, in one way or another, been the victims of violence.  As in every vigilante justice movie, the violence that finds these people is arbitrary, and goes completely unpunished.  The only way to get retribution is to go after those thugs that wronged them.  Also, as in every other successful vigilante movie, there is a cop who is helping them all out (Bob Hoskins). 

But that’s where the similarities end.  Because it is a group of people setting out to see justice done, and not just a lone gunman a la Charles Bronson, many different stories are told.  Sean Bean plays a soldier who has returned from Iraq to find his wife being unfaithful, and is unable to function in real society.  He meets a creepy weirdo security guard in his hotel, who sees all his guns and starts to idolize him.  This security guard has dreams of vigilantism, and recruits other people to join the cause.  Those people include a young man who has been beaten by a group of thugs because they thought he was gay, and another young man who has never been attacked but who lives in constant fear of the possibility.  And the last member of the team is a district attorney whose wife and unborn child have been killed as a warning for him to drop the case of a local gangster.  His story is tough to believe, that he would join this angry mob and completely turn his back on everything he believes, while still seemingly maintaining a rational mind. 

But that’s one of the things I like about this movie.  The characters, in a lot of ways, don’t make any sense.  Their motivations are clear, but their reasoning for going through with this gang violence thing is not.  Although Sean Bean is a military guy, an experienced soldier, we never get the sense that he is particularly good at it, and although he is the de-facto leader of this group because of his time in Iraq, he doesn’t really seem to have any real leadership skills, and he isn’t that impressive a fighter.  I like that because it’s realistic.  And I also like the other characters and their doubts and their sometimes half-assed participation in the project. 

That being said, for a movie that is more character-driven than action-oriented, there is not quite enough explanation for the actions of the individual characters.  I understand the initial anger and the desire for revenge.  But from there, I don’t quite know where these characters are going.  The two characters that make total sense to me are the soldier, who is doing this thing because he desperately needs something to do, and the psychopath who is doing this because he likes being involved in the violence.  But the others remain in a murky sort of quasi-morality that is never really resolved.  Hoskins, also, is an enigma, as the cop who helps them because he wants to see justice done, but who seems at other times not to care about his own job or catching criminals at all.

All in all, though, Outlaw is a solid, tight, gritty little indie movie that is unlike any other vigilante justice movie ever made.  And that’s a good thing.  It came out on DVD September 2nd, from Peace Arch Entertainment.