Ok, Religulous tomorrow. Now: British gangster movie. Yeah, 3 movies in one day, bold move, bold move.
I first heard of this movie in a review of Guy Ritchie’s new movie Rocknrolla (which I’m mildly interested in seeing), as in Gangster No. 1 is better than Rocknrolla. So, onto the Netflix queue it went and, through the miracle of watch instantly, here it is. First off, this is most emphatically not a Guy Ritchie style gangster movie. I mean there are British people, and crime, but that’s about it. Nor is it like in the same vein as Layer Cake
, although it is much closer to that film then the stylish Lock Stock model with a far more reprehensible protagonist. I’d locate it somewhere between Layer Cake and Sexy Beast on the grand scale of British gangster movies. Oh, and the majority of it takes place in the 60s, so maybe it’s kinda like The Bank Job. I guess the point is, this is not a Guy Ritchie movie.
Ok, that rambling little digression over, let us move on. The titular No. 1 Gangster in this movie (Paul Bettany as a young man and Malcolm McDowell as an older man and as the narrator), and what I suppose you could call our hero, is a profoundly bad person, essentially an utter sociopath. It’s a difficult task to have an evil protagonist, you have to make him compelling enough that all the bad shit they do doesn’t turn off the viewer. This movie does a pretty decent job. Basically the Gangster (you never get his name) is a psychopathic power-hungry gangster trying to rise to the top, he’s also got a Patrick Batemen-esque obsession with nice clothes. Right, so it seems like it’s your basic rise and fall of a criminal story (more on the fall later). There’s a ridiculously brutal torture scene, shot in the first person (with the sound and visuals going in and out as the torture goes on and the victim loses consciousness/dies), where the Gangster methodically tortures and kills the mobster who killed his boss (despite the fact that the Gangster basically sets this killing up so he can take over, also because he may/may not have been in love with the boss’s lady), so that’s intense and unique. It certainly makes the whole “rise” part of the story interesting, and bloody. However, I was not a huge fan of the “rise to the top montage” but what can yah do?
Kind of serious problem: Paul Bettany and Malcolm McDowell look nothing alike, Bettany is like half a foot taller. It’s especially weird because all the other people are the same actors in the 60s and 90s, just with make-up. It’s like they had Bettany cast and then McDowell signed on so they had to put him in somewhere. In addition, Bettany is better as a sociopath in the film, he’s got an eerier stare and all. McDowell does crazy better, but it’s more like angry crazy rather than cold and calculating crazy. This is something, you’ll have to move past…it’s a little distracting, especially the change in the nature of crazy between the two.
Finally, the end of this movie made no sense to me. I mean, I get why what happened happened, but it seemed 1.) extremely rushed and 2.) kind of unnecessary. I think I would have preferred it if the film had left it a little more ambiguous what happens to the Gangster. So, basically if you watch this movie you should stop right around the time that he meets back up with a certain guy. In fact, if the movie had ended there it would have been better. Mildly entertaining, nothing groundbreaking, overall kinda meh. This does not give me high expectations for Rocknrolla.
