Seule la mort peut m'arrêter

I have read through about 20 of the users comments after watching this movie earlier tonight on DVD. Most viewers seem to be rather disappointed with this film mainly because they had expectations of the film based on genre, director's and actors' previous work both of which I have seen very little before. The film had my attention from the beginning till the end and I found it very thought provoking.

Will was a gangster who had turned away from crime after a break down (indication of severe depression?). Sometimes when people get overloaded with negative emotions like guilt they can turn into the total opposite of who they once were. As Will mentioned himself : grief about a wasted life. I think this indicates guilt. He coped by turning his back to the world he knew, but also the person he loved most, his brother Davey whom he therefore was not able to help move away from the crime life.Imagine his anger but also the guilt he must have experienced to find his brother raped and having taking his own life! Another wasted life! He could have done something about that but HAD NOT because he ran away from life. In the interactions with former associates and ex-girl friend Helen he established who he had become. Also showing them that they played no role in his life anymore, emotional or otherwise. For his brother who was still important to him he was not able to do anything anymore (and unable via police) except to come up for him by discovering the reason for his death and revenging it. The only way to do that was to take on his former identity again, because the new Will could not do that. Imagine the horror that his brother was hated for behaving the way he himself had before his departure. (Of course this is never a valid reason to rape someone! Rape is hideous crime!) Charming, but cocksure and arrogant!! For Davey Will had always been his role model!!! Davey never got to know the new (more real?) Will. Instead he had lived like Will basing his self-esteem on Will's former reputation as well. Fancy the pain of discovering that! By shooting Boad he kills himself; by intensifying the guilt which had taken over his life. This was exactly as Helen predicted when she said that he was not getting out of it because he wanted to die himself! Nor Clive Owen or Charlotte Rampling acted stiffly out of incompetence, but merely because it was required for their roles of people who had died emotionally a long time ago already! I have greatly enjoyed this movie. It made me think deeply about emotions, motivations an behavior. The above is my interpretation of these, (which doesn't mean I am right).

This story starts with several sets of mostly low life characters in various settings and slowly shows how the characters relate. Davey(Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is the self absorbed party animal, low level drug dealer whose tragic events form the glue to tie the characters together. Will (Clive Owen) first appears as a hard working back to nature recluse, but we soon learn he is Davey's brother. We learn that this morose woodsman was some kind of crime boss. His return to deal with Davey's tragedy kicks off the pivotal events that make up the rest of the movie. What looks at first like several disjointed stories slowly starts tying together. This is not your glorified crime life like the Godfather, or the Sopranos. This story is not about action, it's about how criminals think and feel and act based on those thoughts and feelings. It is a dark world, full of bad choices and painful consequences. It is a somewhat complicated story like these kinds of things are in real life. There are old relationships: loves, friends, enemies that must be dealt with in a time when emotion is hard to control. If you want something fast, are looking for clear cut plots, and easily understood characters you will be disappointed. I personally like movies sometimes that are not afraid to break with clear cut formulas and don't feel compelled to explain everything in clear terms. I found the movie very intriguing. This is a movie about how characters, in this case, criminals, process tragic events. These dark characters living in this dark world had to deal with something that was especially dark to them. The story moves slowly because it is not about action, but the dark setting, the subtle effects on the characters as the story progresses and so on. In reality tragic events are often not clear cut, and the movie is real in its development of the story. I found myself feeling for the characters, albeit mostly sadness and a little pity with a little admiration, compassion, and understanding thrown in. If you enjoy film noir I think you might like this film.

This is an old master's film, in which an aged director goes back to revisit the kind of story he excelled at when young, with dubious results. A more satisfying example of this kind of nostalgia would be John Frankenheimer's "Ronin," and if you had trouble with that one, you'll hate this one.

What Mike Hodges gives us here is a great wind-up and no pitch. London at night, endless shots of almost-human cars under the street lamps, a threatening bunch of thugs who never really thump each other, it all adds up to considerably less than a whole film.

Much has been made in these reviews about the film's ambiguity. I disagree. All the characters, and I mean all, are painfully aware and articulate about their motivations. Gloomy predictions are made about inevitable conflicts that never materialize, action is either cut short or cut away from. The whole thing is like a Michael Mann thriller with all the thrills scrupulously removed. Or perhaps Hodges is trying to reclaim the genre from Guy Ritchie's jokiness.

The script for this film must really have looked threadbare on the page. The dialog is obvious and arthritic. What works is the acting, the cinematography and the director's depressed atmospherics. Clive Owen demonstrates his considerable presence in a part that is intended to be a deliberate let-down. Charlotte Rampling is fascinating as always, more so than her lines. The rest of the cast ranges from good down to OK.

But in his determination to avoid clichés, the director has also managed to avoid incident, pace and interest. So a nice wind-up, but no pitch, no runs, no hits, and some calculated, deliberate errors.

Mood, texture and ambiguity in a British crime thriller? You better believe it. ISWID is no conventional revenge thriller. Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter is something of a gold standard for this kind of thing, subverts auidence expectations by producing a similar setup (a ganster related death, the vengeful brother returning to the city to find out what happened) and then proceeding to wrongfoot them by concentrating on the psychological fallout from crime rather than screen violence or genre cliches.

A moody Clive Owen plays Will Graham, a former London gangster who became so full of loathing for his life of murder and criminality that he has rejected it totally having moved away and left behind the trappings of organised crime. 3 years on he leads a reclusive, hermit like existence, surviving on odd jobs and living in the back of a van. When his younger brother Davy is raped by local hood Malcolm McDowell, he kills himself, an event that serves as the catalyst for Will's return to his former life as he attempts to find those responsible but perhaps more importantly why they did it.

This is a dark, thoughtful piece, less concerned with the usual revenge thriller trajectory than the psychological underpinnings of it's subject matter. It's unusual for this type of film to stop and reflect on events rather than just skip to the inevitable confrontation but Hodges pulls it off not least because his London backdrop is a sinister place where social and moral breakdown are continually in the background. The city has a contaminating effect from which Owen has tried to flee. Crime dehumanises everyone here, both victim and gangster. Much of the movie is about Owen's character attempting to resist a return to his former self but as he learns more about his brother's final hours the guard slips and over the course of the film he gradually transforms back to the killer he once was, culminating in a physical and material change toward the end of the film.

It's not a movie that gives you all the answers nor it does it give you everything you expect. You never find out what single event, if any, caused Owen to leave London so you're left to share in the confusion of those around him. It's also unclear what McDowell's relationship is to Rhys Meyers but this simply adds to the sense of unease. In every scene omission suggests hidden layers which force you maintain distance from the characters, making you a less emotion but more thoughtful observer. It could be anticlimatic for those expecting an orgy of bloody revenge, but Hodges would undermine the disguist registered by Owen's character for his violent past by indulging the voyeuristic demands of the audience to witness that violence. The film cuts away from it and introspectively explores its aftermath, not to mention its occasionally tragic inevitablility. Ambiguity is the watchword here because, Hodges suggests, you can't necessarily trust everything you see and hear. "Memories can deceive" Owen's voiceover tells us in the scene that bookends the film, and as everything that follows the introduction is effectively a flashback, we have to consider the possibility that certain scenes are misleading. The focus of the film intially seems to be the rape of Will's brother but this is the hook upon which Hodge's probes the lure and ultimately the consequence of crime. It won't be to everyone's taste but ISWID will have you scrutinising the detail long after you've left the cinema, something which can't be said for too many crime thillers these days.

An unsettling, thought provoking film. Recommended.

You'll sleep while it's on

As you might guess, I'm not Clive Owen's biggest fan, having suffered through his woodenly monotonous performances, but I forced myself to see this because Mike Hodges has made some good films in the past (as well as cack like MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE). Sadly, this manages to be even worse than MORONS, a numbingly tedious movie where the semi-comatose leads are at least three hours behind the audience in guessing the plot. The shock revelation was obvious from the start and Hodges never makes you interested in getting there. He's not helped by his cast. They're either overacting like McDowell or Meyers or totally incapable of showing signs of life, like Rampling and Owen. Even before it was invented Rampling has always looked like she's had too much botox, but inexperienced filmgoers might think she'd OD'd here she's so stiff. Her expression doesn't change from its deathmask once. Owen is more hopeless than usual, shuffling through like a zombie from a cheap George Romero ripoff. He still can't act and his vocal performance is still like a bored photocopier salesman demonstrating some clapped out machine with one eye on the clock for the pub's opening.

Contrary to other posters, it's not thoughtful or atmospheric. The plot is obvious, the characters infantile. There's no depth, no ideas, just a dragging running time to fill out. And it is achingly slow in the doing it. From a first-timer this picture would have been laughed out of the office at script stage it's so empty and predictable.

British audiences shunned the film (as they did CROUPIER) but Americans might just mistake his accent for a performance. But for the rest of us, it's another pitiful performance in the dullest British gangster film of the past twenty years. That's quite an achievement, but it's the film's only one.

If you really want to see a good new British revenge movie, check out Dead Man's Shoes instead - that really is the business. This is just a photocopy of a photocopy.