"I ain't never going back in, mate, it nearly killed me!"
'Wild' Bill Haywood (Wild Bill, 2011)
'Wild' Bill Haywood (Wild Bill, 2011)
Script Logic; 2/2
Pace; 2/2
Acting; 1/2
Aesthetic; 1/2
Originality & Intention; 2/2
Final Score; 8/10
Final Word;
It would be easy to dismiss this movie out-of-hand as just another 'London lads and gangsters' affair, but you'd be wrong. Very wrong. Sure, it's about crooks and it's set in London but there the similarities end. Gone are the usual excesses of the genre- including a worrying trend in inappropriate glamor. Instead we get to see what the criminal rank-and-file are really like, motivated by greed, stupidity and spite: think less Snatch and more Shameless, less 'sexy' and more 'grimy'. This is a dog-eat-dog world, where the low level crooks fight it out to get ahead while the real masterminds never get their hands dirty. Put another way, you wouldn't want to be friends with the crooks in this film...
Enough credit can't go to Charlie Creed Mills as the titular character for making this story of 'one mans redemption' actually work, selling his arc with real pathos, turning what could have been a very unlikable cliche into a real man, one that you actually care for despite his past mistakes- however first-time director Dexter Fletcher also deserves praise for breathing fresh life into a tired genre. I genuinely can't recall a London gangster film that ever had so much heart.
That's not to say that Wild Bill is a soft film; it's still a difficult watch sometimes, underpinned throughout by a constant anxiety that Bill's old life is going to manifest itself in some very nasty ways on the people he loves- and all of this leads us to a bloody Western-like climax.
It's also very funny, in parts...
The film really has only 2 flaws: a totally miss cast Andy Serkis, who while normally brilliant seems to be acting here as though he were in another film, and a cheap made-for-TV feel. Still, small issues in an otherwise solid film. Proof, if any were needed, that real men can cry.
The film really has only 2 flaws: a totally miss cast Andy Serkis, who while normally brilliant seems to be acting here as though he were in another film, and a cheap made-for-TV feel. Still, small issues in an otherwise solid film. Proof, if any were needed, that real men can cry.
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