REVIEWED - OUTLAW:Though provocative, Outlaw ultimately sensationalises the violence it appears to condemn, writes Michael Dwyer
AS Paul Anka croons the anodyne Puppy Love on the soundtrack, Outlaw opens on a deceptively idyllic sequence of a young middle-class couple on their wedding day in London. There is the briefest suspicion that writer-director Nick Love has gone all soft and gooey after his abrasive, darkhumoured dramas, The Football Factory, dealing with soccer hooligans, and The Business, set among British criminals on the Costa del Sol in the 1980s.
Stopping his car at a junction, the groom, Gene Dekker (Danny Dyer), gets into and a verbal altercation with the occupants of another car. The confrontation turns physical and he is brutally beaten. It's about five minutes into the movie and we know that we are, after all, in familiar Nick Love territory for another exploration of masculinity, crime and violence.
Along with Dekker, the protagonists include a paratrooper (Sean Bean) alienated and unhinged on returning from service in Iraq; a disillusioned former detective (Bob Hoskins) who observes that the drug dealers have "the police in their pockets"; a barrister (Lennie James) threatened by lackeys of the criminal kingpin he is prosecuting; a gay Cambridge student (Rupert Friend) who has been attacked by yobs; and a creepy, CCTV-obsessed security guard (Sean Harris).
The men in Outlaw - women are peripheral, as ever in Love's films - share a deep-rooted frustration with the criminal justice system in Blair's Britain, believing that the law is unbalanced in favour of the perpetrator over the victim, and that corruption is rife among the enforcers of law and order. Banding together, these men decide to take the law into their own hands.
The movie taps into prevalent themes at a time when vicious, unprovoked assaults are commonplace on the streets of Britain and Ireland, and when farmers have been jailed for shooting and killing intruders on their property. And it takes several sideswipes at the sensationalism with which crime is covered in the media.
Love's provocative, deliberately disturbing film raises morally complex issues as his vigilante creations take to the streets. Some of the men are initially reluctant to fight back with physical force because it's not in their nature. The film prompts the viewer to consider the consequences as violence begets violence.
Simultaneously, however, the film is graphic in its staging of violence, embellished with bone-crunching sound effects. While the intent is evidently more serious than in Love's earlier films, and the film is rooted in bleak cynicism, Outlaw operates on parallel tracks - vigilante action movie and socially concerned drama - that ultimately never converge.
