DEAD MAN DOWN, A Pointless Action Flick

In Dead Man Down, Colin Farrell plays Victor/Laszlo (whom I’ll just call Victor henceforth), a Hungarian gangster who’s part of an organized crime syndicate. We soon find out he is not who he pretends to be.

The movie opens with a talk about children, which nicely sets the mood and foreshadows some of the movie’s story. The first half hour of the movie introduces us to the members of the crime group – primarily Victor, Alphonse (Terrence Howard) and Darcy (Dominic Cooper). Alphonse is the leader of the group and for the past three months he has been receiving odd, haunting, threatening messages, and he is out to find the culprit. He thinks he knows who is doing this to him, and takes his goons up to this guy’s place. It turns out into a major firefight, and Victor saves Alphonse’s life, putting Victor into Alphonse’s limelight.

Alphonse doesn’t know, though, that Victor’s the one sending the messages to him. Secretly, Victor is out for revenge: when Victor moved from Hungary to live the American Dream, he lived in one of the buildings owned by Alphonse, but Alphonse needed to rid the building of the tenants. They were all thrown out, but Victor and his wife and daughter stayed, resulting in the death of his wife and daughter, and as the Albanians who were sent to “do the deed” thought, also Victor’s death.

So in the time after his family’s deaths, Victor prepared for the ultimate revenge and infiltrating Alphonse’s group. His plans change when he meets a French girl who lives in the apartment across of his. Turns out the girl, Beatrice (Noomi Rapace) saw him kill a man in his apartment and is using this to extort him into killing someone for her: the man who hit her in a DUI. Her face was “seriously” busted, and she feels her life is ruined by it.

The rest of the movie chronicles the revenge of the two, including an awkward, blooming love between the two. I won’t spoil whether or not they succeed in their plans to get revenge.

Let me start by saying I like Noomi Rapace the actress – I think she’s quite fierce, and just a very cool lady (and interestingly, she worked together with somewhat inexperienced Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev before on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)) . But this character, Beatrice, is one of the least likable characters I’ve encountered in movie for some time. She is extremely obsessed with her exterior, she used to be a beautician, but now her face is absolutely ruined, and she wants to kill the guy who ruined her face. Sure, she’s bullied for it by the kids in her neighborhood, but this all is so extremely over the top. It’s bad writing: Noomi is a beautiful woman, and some scars in her face (who the beautician, in real life, would know how to cover up), don’t make her any less beautiful; people calling her “monster” all the time is just very incredible. Additionally, the “monster” tag scrawled on her front door isn’t removed – wtf is that about? Beatrice lives with her mother – any mother would remove that from a door instantly to save her daughter’s feelings, I think.

I was very much disturbed by the fact that the audience is led to believe that a woman becomes monster because of some scars (in this case, the scars were quite minor for someone who had her entire face “rebuilt”) . This was simply male chauvinism from the writer’s end – or maybe it’s just my naïveté that I think that people generally are good enough to not see such a woman as a “monster”, I’ll let you make the call. On a very similar note, the scene where Beatrice plucks half an eyebrow away of someone’s face: I KNEW at that moment the writer had to be a man. Why none of the women working on this movie interfered here, I don’t know. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to actually take away the whole eyebrow? The woman lay there meek as a sheep while in reality, she would’ve jumped up, screaming – trust me.

It wasn’t just some of Beatrice’s stuff that was incredible, unfortunately. Some of the action sequences were just plain stupid – exciting and visually interesting, yes, but stupid. Who sets off a bomb in a building that could easily hurt a loved one? Who would take that risk?

The other characters were decently likable. Terrence Howard played the haunted if somewhat stupid gangster, which he did just fine. Cooper played Darcy, a naïve, young gangster wanting to climb the ladder, and so putting himself in harm’s way. Farrell as Victor… I don’t know what it is, but I find Farrell a very bland actor. There is always a certain depth missing in his characters, even if in this movie the back story and actions told us he’s a guy capable of forgiveness and even love, I didn’t see it so much in his expressed emotions. Also, at some point in the movie, Victor says he made it his job to get rid of his Hungarian accent – instead he had a somewhat Irish accent. Huh. How could that possibly be?

One thing I really liked about this movie was the cinematography. Especially, the lighting stood out to me. They really set the mood of the movie. Additionally, the color palette was great and very vibrant – even more so because of the high color contrast. That high contrast really added to the sense of the double life that Victor leads. It seems that this is what Paul Cameron does though – on his track record are some visually stunning movies but, as I recall, are all somewhat similar in cinematography. Nevertheless, it was pretty good.

On a final note: the music in this movie was pretty horrible. The high-pitched violins guiding almost every scene grated on my nerves, and the annoying French pop song that reappears throughout the movie a few times was a bad choice. It did not fit the mood and I found it a bit cliché that they would choose a French song for a French girl. It’s too obvious.

Discussion

Honestly, there wasn’t much in this movie that’s interesting to discuss from a thematic point of view. There were some expressed ideas about how an organized crime group is organized – Darcy’s wish to climb the ladder, the big crime lords, et cetera. There was the whole “Alphonse simply flicked his hand and wasn’t prosecuted for the crimes he committed” failure of the justice system, and Victor’s turn towards vigilantism, but they said nothing deep enough that actually made a point.

What did struck me as interesting, though, was the complete absence of law enforcement in this movie. They only show up after the big shootout when a man hangs dead, dangling from a window. At some point, there’s a big bunch of Albanians carrying heavy artillery down the street in broad daylight, and no one stops them, not even the quivering mail man (ha ha). That was a major “riiiiggghhhtttt” moment.

So, basically, this movie is just brainless action. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is your go-to film. If you want more depth, more likable and less stupid characters, this is not your go-to film, and I could recommend to just skip this one. If you’re gonna watch it nevertheless, just enjoy the prettiness of Collin and “monster” Noomi.

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