Rather than the sneering, brutish monsters of Death Wish and its ilk, Meadows shows the perpetrators to be believable human beings, at times even likeable ones; aside from the occasional criminality of their actions, they could be any group of slacker buddies. This muddies the righteous sense of approval we're supposed to feel at their deaths, as well as giving credence to Richard's last speech.
It's here that I start seeing what's wrong with Meadows' approach. The characters are recognizable, all right - they're recognizable fuck-ups, and Considine's lucky to have to take them on, rather than some people who know what they're doing. Dead Man's Shoes has a couple of moments that exist solely because if they were changed, there wouldn't be a movie. The most blatant of these is this: After the toughs find out where Richard is staying, they attempt an ambush.
The idea is to lure Richard out into the open where lead tough Sonny (Gary Stretch) can take him out with a rifle. Things get confused, and Sonny's first shot misses. Richard just stands there and glowers at him. My question is, why doesn't Sonny reload? He's standing right there, for God's sake.
The lopsided nature of the conflict points towards the paradoxical nature of Dead Man's Shoes's tonal consistency. If the thrills are removed, then it denudes the action and shows it for what it is; unfortunately, it also leaches the tension. Without tension, there's no drama. Without drama, no amount of true-sounding dialogue or small character moments can keep the film from providing no more than what its synopsis suggests: there's a man who's angry and he kills some other people because he's angry.
Meadows intends to show us that violence in response to previous violence is still needless violence that solves nothing, and he does that well. Sacrificing interest to make your point, however, is a self-defeating artistic gambit.
What's more, Meadows isn't above the kind of emotional pornography that mars most second-rate revenge dramas. The modern-day scenes of the villains show them to be slackers; the flashback scenes, though, paint a different picture. Sonny, in particular, is two different characters.
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Article comments
1 - peter walsh
For me, it's Ahab mate. Richard is smashing though the paper masks, looking for a deeper core to strike at with his vengeance. The religious motifs and themes of the film are tangled and deep-running. The killings are predestined, and cannot be prevented. That, I reckon, is why Sonny doesn't reload his gun. He knows he can't stop Richard. Ignore the banal backdrop, the grubbiness of the town and its lowlife. This is heaven and hell, with all the rhythms of the universe pumping through it.
2 - simon l
To question why Anthony is handicapped, and why Sonny does not reload his gun brings to the surface that maybe you just did not understand the film.
Sonny was the big I am, all front, he was scared and in shock, that is why he sat back down in his seat holding the rifle, the treatment of a young handicapped boy let alone his brother shows us the justification for such brutality. ten out of ten.