Metacritic-Rezensionen

Why should anyone care about a movie about two scabrous vulgarians? Because the subject of a really good movie is sometimes not that important. It's the acting, writing, and direction that count.

Tremendously acted by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb with exactly the right absence of sympathy, although Cox arguably loses his nerve on this score in the film’s dying moments.

What makes the film a classic is the skill with which the leads are so believable as heroin addicts, pivoting from intense love to hatred and dope sickness, all while maintaining the couple's signature snarl.

Alex Cox’s retelling of the Sex Pistols’ story from the point of view of Sid (Gary Oldman) and girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) works as both spirited punk biopic and tragically touching love story. It’s a hard film to watch at times, as Vicious plunges deeper into his heroin-induced slump, but told with skill and compassion, which make up for the onscreen squalor.

For a while, the tension powers the film. And when it doesn’t, the lead performances by Oldman and Webb pick up the slack.

A film that never feels remotely real, content to wallow in dead-rock-star mythology and tedious druggie indulgences.

Sid and Nancy rages with a vitriolic fury which eventually becomes tiresome.

Sid and Nancy doesn't try to win its audience's sympathy in any conventional way, which is just as well, since that would have been a losing battle. But it does succeed in offering bleak, nasty and sometimes hilarious glimpses of life in the punk demimonde.

The performances are, of course, magnificent: Webb owns her largely thankless role, while Oldman snarls, spits and staggers like he means it, maaan. But we’re never given a reason to care about their characters, beyond the fact they were famous.

The only thing that is sustained in Sid and Nancy is a tone of clinical disinterest that leaves you asking why Cox would want to make a movie about them. By the end, you know more about Sid and Nancy than you care to, and about Alex Cox, quite a bit less than you'd like.