Lawless, Savages and The House At The End Of The Street

It was such a promising story. We are in Virginia at the time of prohibition, and the Bondurant brothers seem to have the trade in bootleg alcohol sown up. But the writer of Lawless (Nick Cave) has tried to portray them each as vastly different characters. Tom Hardy and Shia La Boef are wholly unconvincing (but that is not their fault) and they end up wooden and ridiculous. Instead of concentrating more on the plot, we have a ponderous script punctuated by scenes of casual violence. The director, John Hillcoat, has actually made quite a good looking movie and the odd action sequences are quite thrilling. There are some neat cameos from actors out of the top drawer. But the characters for Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska just drop in now and again. What could have been a very good movie ends up a bit of a mess.

Oliver Stone's Savages had received some awful reviews. But I found it a quite reasonable thriller about drug gangs. It has a good plot and the story unfolds with pace and some surprises along the way. The two main leads, Taylor Kitsch and Aaaron Johnson, are pretty poor, especially when they are up against (in both ways) Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek and John Travolta. And newcomer Blake Lively does her bit as the damsel in distress. The photography is excellent (we would not expect anything else) so the movie looks great. There is some rapid and intense dialogue (Stone has been watching a lot of Tarantino's work), some good action sequences. Immediately forgettable, but enjoyable at the time.

It is hard to describe The House at the End of the Street. First of all where does the title come from when there are only two houses near each other in the woods? I thought it might be haunted house mystery, but no. More a reworking of Psycho. So that got me confused. But not as much as the truly awful script and atrocious editing. There was obviously only one reason it got it's funding, and that was when they had signed up Jennifer Lawrence. She really tries her best, given the dreadful dialogue, and almost saves the film from being that bad. But director Mark Tonderai and his writers have conspired to make it one big mess.