Sometimes a film can have all the right ingredients but not quite come together. Lawless is one of those.
I was looking forward to the second collaboration between John Hillcoat as director and Nick Cave as screenwriter after their Australian western The Proposition, and the cast of Lawless is really great too, with Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain amongst others. However, Lawless suffers from being formulaic, and not doing anything to stand out from the formula.
Plot wise it’s a standard gangster/smuggling/crime film, borrowing bits of Goodfellas, The Godfather, Blow, Public Enemies and countless others. But those films have style, panache and character depth… whereas Lawless has Shia LaBeouf. LaBeouf here is set to his default mode of annoying, which is a shame as I hoped he could do more outside of the restrictive franchise movies he’s appeared in. Meanwhile Tom Hardy gives an unremarkable performance by his standards, grunting his way through the film in a moderately endearing but ultimately shallow way, Guy Pearce’s smarmy special agent grates, and Gary Oldman is wasted giving a good performance in a severely underused role. I did like Dane DeHaan though, last seen being excellent in Chronicle, and here giving a supporting character life and likeability.
Hillcoat, who made a big impression on me with The Proposition and The Road, struggles to find his own style here – direction is functional and by-the-numbers. At times Cave’s screenplay can be frustrating too – the bad guys have a habbit of turning up conveniently to force tension.
As is always the case though, whenever Nick Cave and Warren Ellis get to do a film score the results are quite beautiful. The style will be familiar to anyone knows the music from The Assassination of Jesse James, The Road, or The Proposition, and again it’s both delightful on the ears and well suited to the film. There’s an added hint of Firefly and Deadwood on a couple of the tracks too, which is always welcome in my book.
My advise with Lawless would be to skip the movie and buy the soundtrack.