Rating of
3/4
"Dead Man's Shoes" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 01/16/12
This bleak tale of revenge set in a small English town sees Paddy Considine leaving the army and returning home to extract brutal revenge on a group of small time drug dealers who abused his retarded younger brother while he was away. This is an unusual revenge thriller as it often looks more like a slasher flick; Considine is obviously an unstable murderer who has been trained to kill and he systematically executes each of his victims in a very horror film style way. Except in this case his victims are a bunch of unsympathetic scum bags who you can't help feeling probably deserve their fate. In this way the film throws up many mixed emotions as you're never quite sure who you are supposed to be rooting for! But the real kick in the gut is provided by Shane Meadows; he directs very much like a documentary photographer cataloging the grim reality of working class small town life. The actors involved are ugly. They have bad hair and cheap clothes. In other words they look like REAL people, not Hollywood's glamorized, sanitized version of them. As such you feel you are right there in the thick of it, actually witnessing these gruesome events rather than just watching a piece of entertainment. It won't be to everyone's tastes as it's quite a tough movie to sit through because of its extremely grim subject matter, but the extremely powerful final scene makes it more than worth it.
