Idle curiosity of the how-bad-can-it-be form; the dire IMDB rating suggests it is worse than the other British nepomovie by Kate Winslet and son. Both drew strong casts and reek of L-plates on the Lamborghinis. This one was directed by Ronan Day-Lewis from a script he co-wrote with his father Daniel Day-Lewis who got top billing.
For quite a while it's difficult to figure out when it is, where we are or what we're doing there, let alone who these people are and why we should care. Something breaks in some-kind-of-father Sean Bean's household so he departs on a Honda Africa Twin for a forest of unknown distance armed with the emergency coordinates of the abode of hermit Day-Lewis. This leaves mother Samantha Morton at home with her and somebody else's son Samuel Bottomley. From there things get revelatory with lots of talk and not much show: apparently these brothers are Catholics, brought up in a boys' home, something about child abuse, something about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, revenge as fantasy, violence, a there-it-is account of a war crime, sectarian hate, family, a bizzaro scifi dream sequence. (Near as I can tell Day-Lewis has avoided the scifi genre thus far.)
I guess the central flaw with this project is its unoriginal genericity, its insincere mimesis. Day-Lewis's hermit reminded me of Hugo Weaving's (does the British film industry also need some revival?) with moments lifted from the life and times of Francis Begbie. (Danny Boyle showed us his stories; here we get only words and extreme emoting.) Apparently there is and isn't redemption in Christ. Uncontrollable teenage violence is limply intimated, in contrast to the masterful Adolescence (2025). A Magnolia (1999)-esque hail storm with no consequences, no impact.
The cinematography is a mixed bag. Initially it was so dank and dark I couldn't figure out what I was being shown. The work outdoors is far better but the great floating shots on the beach of the brothers are presumably easy now with a drone. This is life with a soundtrack: maudlin 1970s retro English rock (Black Sabbath) and otherwise heavy-duty noise.
I watched after a sneaky revisit of Gangs of New York (2002). Day-Lewis again sports a moustache, a horseshoe evoking Sean Connery in his glory years (e.g. Zardoz (1974)). This, in combination with the meme that he's everyone's favourite actor and in nobody's favourite movie, suggests that the only solution to what ails Britain is for him to sign up as the next James Bond.
Manohla Dargis. Does it take place in the present day? (Someone toasts the Queen but I guess that could have been a nod to their glory years and/or an ironic acknowledgement of Charlie.) Adrian Horton: two stars. Painfully serious. Set in the late 1980s. Peter Sobczynski. It's too easy to spill words on this thing, itself mostly words.
