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 Shane Meadows
has been awarded almost iconic status as one of the pioneers of low
budget filmmaking in Britain, which he certainly is, but some people
find his work on screen doesn't always reach – on the audience
satisfaction scale - the parts others claim it does reach. This week
his latest opus Dead Man's Shoes opens Stateside in Greenwich Village, the heartland of New York's artistic and creative community. I turned to the Village Voice to see what their film critic Luke Y Thompson made of it.
Dead Man's Shoes
Directed by Shane Meadows
Magnolia, opens May 12, Cinema Village
Paddy Considine is an ex-soldier named Richard who comes home to a
small town in England to see his retarded brother Anthony (Toby
Kebbell), who had been hanging out with the local gang of drug-dealing
thugs and been cruelly abused. Richard is out for blood, and after
breaking into various gang members' houses and pulling pranks, he tells
the ringleader, Sonny (Gary Stretch), that he'll kill them all—and they
can even try to come and get him first if they'd like. Fortunately for
Richard, Sonny's guys are the stupidest hoods in the world. Dead Man's
Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious
revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages
to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.
Director Shane Meadows based the movie on a true story about a young
man from his hometown who died. Presumably, then, Meadows gets some
sort of catharsis out of it. Too bad we don't.
Luke Thompson's crit from Village Voice
The original crit is here....:
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0619,thompson,73167,20.html
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VV gave One Life Stand a stunning write-up when it could all too easily have gone the other way.
I doubt Shane's bothered. I'm sure his next one's good to go...