26 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
this is the best british gangster film since the long good friday .
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jon bennet ( played by andrew howard ) is an extremely good assassin .
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as such he is probably an evil man but it does not worry him .
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he has become an unquestioning weapon .
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he is in the employ of a kingpin ( david calder ) far more evil than he is .
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but even assassins have innocent pasts .
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he runs into an old from school days and he is married to a mutual girl friend from school .
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complicating matters is that they live near where he had a recent job and their young daughter may have seen him at the crime .
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a big piece of what makes this film work is the depiction of the kingpin .
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calder is a familiar actor in britain , though not frequently seen in the us .
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he was seen in the world is not enough .
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here he creates one of the best screen villains in recent years .
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he is at once seductive and repellent like a beautiful venomous snake .
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his lair is underground , apparently in a sewer , where he lives like the king of sewer rats .
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it is the kingpin who pulls the strings that will control bennet's life .
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paul sarossy who directs spent most of his career as a cinematographer and like the kingpin's lair , he has molded images of class and style out of the darkness .
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by using semi-darkness and letting the colors of deep blue and black dominate every scene he makes the film visually as ominous as anything in this nether world .
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this is a world that is cold and unfriendly .
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sorossy creates a world of violence much more by what we hear than what we see .
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this is a film with a great deal of physical violence occurring just out of reach .
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we see very little but we hear a great deal more and we imagine more than that .
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the screenplay is by peter waddington based on the novel by neil cross , but it is sarossy's film all the way .
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it creates indelible images of evil .
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i rate it an 8 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale .
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( i do hope they do not use the tagline " don't mess with mr . in-between . " )
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