Battling Bootleggers

Review: Lawless

"Just the good ol' boys
Never meaning no harm
Beats all you ever saw
Been in trouble in the law
Since the day they was born."

Lawless is exactly what The Dukes of Hazzard would look like if, instead of being a family-friendly television show, it was an R-rated film.

The protagonists, the Bondurant brothers, are known for always being in trouble with the law. But they are certainly not good boys and definitely mean harm to any who get in their way.

Lawless follows these moonshine-brewing brothers during Prohibition as they stand up to a corrupt Special Deputy who wants a cut of the cash from their white-lightning profits. It is a film that is more than filled with graphic violence; it is a movie that is propelled by it. Driven not by plot and not by characters, but by its own brutality, Lawless is a film without much point or purpose.

If I had to guess, I would say that the script for Lawless was a rough draft of a really good movie. But for whatever reason, that rough draft was never edited or polished, but rather sent straight into production. I say this for a number of reasons.

First of all, there are some moments which are simply entirely irrelevant to the entire film. One in particular features two men and one woman sitting around a campfire. The woman and one of the men begin to become mildly intimate until the leg of the other man catches on fire. Who are these people? Their identity remains a mystery, but we do see one of the men killed later. Maybe if we knew who he was we would have cared.

Likewise, Gary Oldman's gangster character is completely wasted. We see him shoot up a car in the film's epilogue and later he buys some whiskey from the brothers. That's it. It was a character full of potential to add depth and intricacy to the plot, but was relegated to be an entirely inconsequential character. A pity, considering how talented Oldman (The Book of Eli) is.

But more than sloppy editing, the real problem in Lawless is how little plot it really has. At two hours, our time feels wasted, because between the time the title appears and the credits roll, not much happens. The slimy deputy, a perfectly-cast Guy Pearce (Memento) shows up and declares war on the brothers and at the end there's a short, anti-climactic shootout. People die graphic deaths in between, but not much else occurs.

As the brothers, Shia LaBeouf (Transformers), Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), and Jason Clarke (Public Enemies) each do well, although none of them grow their characters in any real way.

This is expected of Hardy and Clarke's static characters, since they epitomize the local legend about the brothers being immortal and constant. But despite setting up LaBeouf's character as one who would recognize the immorality of his brother's brutality, he simply accepts and aspires to reflect it.

Jessica Chastain (The Help) and Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) provide the sex appeal and love interest, but they too, like every other character in the film, seem to be only able to react to events rather than being active catalysts in the plot. For Chastain and  Wasikowska specifically, it seems as though they were only included based on the cinematic myth that a movie must always have a splash of romance. Don't get me wrong, I like them both, I just wish they, again like every other character, were given more to do.

A couple of things I did really like were how beautiful and exciting director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) made Virginia look and how the mountain-music soundtrack from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis spoke to my secret redneck side.

Overall, "Lawless pulls the magician's trick of distraction, offering enough superficial entertainment value - with atmospheric use of locations, charismatic actors, and spurts of shocking violence - to divert attention from its faults" (Leonard Maltin).

Based on a true story and adapted from a book ("The Wettest County in the World") by the grandson of LaBeouf's character, Lawless clearly has the potential for an interesting and compelling story. Yet, for whatever reason, we get the rough draft of this good idea, a draft motivated by its own violence rather than plot or character.

The Final Word: Wait to rent it.