By the Gun

There's nothing essentially new in this piece. Despite that it is still a worthy movie, and will please fans of mob dramas. It's extremely well cast, better, I think, than the recent Gotti. So it comes across as genuine, with plenty of evil types, and these horrible men contrast well with the selfish and naive lead, all giving really good performances with an edgy and convincing script. The soundscape is minimal yet brooding, and works well. The sub-plots of love, friendship debt and family relationships gel really well with the overarching theme. It all leads to a rather surprising conclusion that was excellently done. My grips with it are that the promise of establishing shots that this film would include good cinematography never really materialised, though some of the down and dirty locations were well chosen. It certainly has that poorer suburbs of New York look down pat, like the Sopranos sometimes does, or movies like Black Mass. By The Gun is not an original idea, but it is really well made and the actors here have definitely risen to the occasion.

"You watched the first half of Goodfellas like a thousand times." That is an actual line from this film that feels more like a critique of itself. By the Gun is a Scorsese wannabe film that has terrible dialog and even worse accents. The only thing worse than being a Scorsese wannabe is being a Scorsese rip-off and while By the Gun does have moments of blatant plagiarism, it does quite fully embrace it. The dialog and screenplay feels like they are excerpts from better films in the same genre. It never quite gels coming out of any of these actors outside of Slaine and Harvey Keitel. The best part about this film is Slaine, he turns in a good performance but his character feels more and more like Jackie Boy from Mean Streets going into the third act. Harvey Keitel is...well, he's Harvey Keitel, this guy created the tough guy so he gets a pass just because he plays this part in his sleep. Leighton Meester does her best here and it is nowhere near enough to salvage the cast from being a complete disaster. My last and final complaint about the cast is more a question than anything, but what in the hell is Toby Jones doing in this film and what the hell was that accent? Furthermore, the film is too bright and vibrant. What we're seeing isn't doing the moments of grit any justice, they're glossy, crisp and hardly the vibe it wants to be going for. But, setting aside a terrible cast and poor cinematography, what is most important here is that this film isn't entertaining. It isn't interesting, it falls in line with being another poorly done mob film that was lucky enough to get picked up by a distributor.

Usually I root for the lead in a film. In this case I just couldn't. I fully understand now why the lead character Ben Barnes distanced himself from the film after it's release. He was made to look like a wanna be punk gangster aka WANKSTER. I refused to garner any sympathy for his situation, simply because the acting didn't get me there. I was more rooting for his best friend Slaine and he was a complete reprobate. I have to say it did live up to the expectations of they typical mob movie with the strip clubs, test of loyalty and revenge tactics. The alienation of at least 1 parent and a sibling torn between the 2. However, with the exception of Keitel, Coaster and Slaine the acting was pretty disappointing. Not sorry I watched but was predictable through and through.

i watched this earlier today, its fairly well filmed, realistic locations etc but to be honest is was clear after 30 mins or so that i was really wasting my time, even so i decided to see it through to its bitter clichéd predictable end, it amazes me how actors of the calibre of both Toby Jones and Harvey Keitel ended up in this movie all be it playing bit parts... maybe they 'had to do a little favour for someone' by being in this very average clichéd seen it all before type film... a familiar tale of protection rackets, strip clubs, hits going wrong, family loyalty, revenge and of course no one gets away clean! including the audience! 4/10

Three stars only because of the performance by Slaine as Nick's friend. This movie is comically bad. Every time you see the lead character he is either lighting a cigarette (he lights no fewer than 5 cigarettes in the opening scenes alone), or tossing a long, freshly lit cigarette out a car window. It almost seems as if somebody in production decided Nick looks good with a full Marlboro 120, but not with one that is half smoked. If it didn't mean sitting through this mud again, I'd love to go back and see exactly how many times a cigarette is lit by either Nick one of the other one dimensional wannabe gangster characters. At any given time somebody is flipping open an old school zippo and doing a Fonzarello routine lighting his smoke. The only saving grace in this film is the performance by Slaine as Nick's best friend. This guy is extremely watchable in this role (and lights up the screen instead of a smoke).