It’s not charming. It’s not pretty. It’s all grit and blood, and it’s one of the best movies to hit the screen this year. Director John Hillcoat gathers all of the brutality of bootlegging in the era of Prohibition into “Lawless” and hits you in the face harder than a punch from Tom Hardy wearing brass knuckles.
The audience reactions to some of the more violent scenes were worth the cost of admission alone. I don’t want to spoil the “oh, oh my God, ow” factor for anyone, but this movie gets bloody, quick. As in first-fifteen-minutes quick.
The story follows three brothers who start off as simple small-time bootleggers. The Bondurant boys, Jack (Shia LaBeouf), Howard (Jason Clark) and Forrest (Tom Hardy) had the local police in their pocket and managed to grind out meager profits selling their moonshine to local farmers and small towns. As the business of moonshining became more and more lucrative, gangsters from Chicago began pouring into the boothills looking for a piece of the action. Combine that with the appearance of a crooked Special Deputy (Guy Pearce), and the Bondurant boys begin to find themselves in the middle of an all-out war for control over their market.
Tom Hardy once again shows why he’s one of the most wanted actors in Hollywood. His ability to control the screen exactly like how he did while playing Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises” is incredible. In “Lawless,” he plays Forrest Bondurant, who may speak simply and grunt often, but he carries with him a set of brass knuckles and the legend that he is un-killable. Every second Hardy is on screen is another second you spend on the edge of your seat. His speech is excruciatingly slow and deliberate and always leaves you wanting for more. Couple that with the feeling that he just might beat the pulp out of whoever he is talking to at the time, and you get a character that you simply can’t take your eyes off.
The rest of the cast plays off Hardy’s performance perfectly. Jason Clark does an incredible job playing Forrest’s alcoholic brother Howard, and Shia LaBeouf put in a great performance as Jack, the runt of the litter with aspirations of running the show. Jessica Chastain helps transport you away form the brutality a few times with her lovely character, Maggie. Unfortunately, Gary Oldman only saw the screen for maybe 20 minutes, but his portrayal of Floyd Banner, a ruthless Chicago gangster, was amazing during the short time he was on screen.
One of the few gripes I have about the movie is how slow it seems to move at times. Some may find the movie to simply hover between intense scenes and lacks exposition throughout its slower moments. I personally found the pacing to be great and loved the sharp contrast of the violent moonshining lifestyle with the love story between Bertha Minnix (Mia Wasikowska) and Jack Bondurant (LaBeouf). However, the ending was also somewhat bothersome. Rightfully, the movie needs to end right after its resolution (you’ll know the scene when you see it) instead of giving an in-depth epilogue for the characters, which seemed to drag on for much too long to the point where it started to spoil the effect of the story’s powerful resolution.
Overall, this movie deserves a very solid four freshly broken collarbones out of five, mostly because watching Tom Hardy break collarbones is a great way to spend an hour and a half. “Lawless” is a wonderful mixture of love, greed and family commitment set in a ruthless period in our history. It gives you death, violence, brutality and grit. And you will love it for that.
