Lawless Reviews
Top CriticIt's slight and casual to the point of laziness, but it's straight fun, done with knowledge and a laconic pleasure. You could do far worse.
The center of narrative gravity is hard to locate; for whom are we rooting, and does anything really ripple outward from this nasty local fight?
Fans of The Proposition will have to settle for sublimely evil performances by Gary Oldman (as a murderous rival) and Guy Pearce (as a government agent) and a large quotient of gut-wrenching violence.
With a dynamite cast, an iconic screenwriter in rocker Nick Cave and an Aussie director in John Hillcoat, you assume a new classic. What you get is an ambitious try.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
You can sense the filth, and smell the rust, and feel the ingrained poverty that might well convince a family of survivors (of World War I and the Spanish flu) to make their fortune selling moonshine to their neighbors.
There's something at the movie's heart that remains flimsy and inauthentic, a kid in his older brother's ill-fitting shoes.
Much of the action may be nearly as grim as in director John Hillcoat's previous feature, "The Road" - "Lawless" is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This isn't to say that there's not enough here, but just don't look for it all to add up.
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| Original Score: 3/5
I can only admire this film's craftsmanship and acting, and regret its failure to rise above them.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Lawless" offers a compelling, gruesome and instructive time-travel exercise.
At its core, this is a film about men doing violence to men. And they do plenty of it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The unflinching slicing and dicing is viscerally brutal, but without sufficient character development Lawless simply feels lifeless.
This is a well-made movie that deserves a higher profile than it is being accorded.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Ultimately, "Lawless" is just another gangster movie, and not a very good one ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The action is, overall, as exciting as the primary performances are impressive.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This should've been a really good picture, especially with Hillcoat's crack ensemble. Instead it's a stilted battle waged between the material and the interpreters.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
An inescapable sense of "so what?" sets in early with "Lawless," almost as soon as Shia LaBeouf begins his lackluster opening narration.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A story of entrepreneurship, of family, of fighting for one's rights - the right to make white lightning, and money. It's as American as apple pie.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Turns the Virginia hills of the early 1930s into just another backdrop for a clockwork succession of perfunctorily filmed showdowns and shootouts.
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| Original Score: 2/5
"Lawless" is a sprawling story of dirt road bloodlines and stubbornness, solid but a bit out of control.
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| Original Score: B-
Historical authenticity and pulp fiction blend nicely in "Lawless," a lush-looking drama full of blazing Tommy guns, fast jalopies, brutish men and delicate women.
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| Original Score: 3/4
At least a third of its two hours is devoted to "arty'' shots of landscapes.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Hillcoat and Cave give us more than an action story. They create a world.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Lawless turns the literary tone of its source novel into something faster, leaner and more populist.
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| Original Score: B+
All slicked up but mostly firing blanks, John Hillcoat's Prohibition-era western Lawless looks and sounds great but fails to tell a compelling story.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Hillcoat's ultra-violent drama plays like a hot, sweaty, delusional fever dream and is similarly fitful. It can be visceral and operatic, beautiful and brutal but also slow and overlong.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A character study that puts its focus on its least sympathetic characters.
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| Original Score: 2/4
[Lawless] is both too obvious and not direct enough, and its shapelessness dilutes its power.
Shia LaBeouf plays young Jack Bondurant with more conviction and skill than we have seen before.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Hardy's an exceptional actor, and LaBeouf has a certain fizzy charisma, but they each twang embarrassingly every time they have a sentence or two to utter, and not even in a way that matches.
The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.
The fire that stokes the story is violence. Yet despite some gruesome images and the psychotic fervor of Rakes, it's a frustratingly slow boil.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Mr. Hardy mostly grunts, growls and ribbits, occasionally interrupting his angry bullfrog impersonation to deliver down-home bromides that make him sound like Toby Keith choking on a Cheeto.
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| Original Score: 2/5
A great deal of rowdy, crowd-pleasing fun, and there ain't nothin' wrong with that.
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| Original Score: B
Hardy's presence is compelling, but the film comes fully alive only when it turns bloody. At those moments, though, it has the kick of a mule.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Intermittently intriguing, wildly uneven.
It makes for an oddly comfy experience considering the death and hurt at the film's core.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Lawless tries to be flawless; as a movie, it's often listless - lifeless.
Fueled by a brooding sense of dread, visceral bursts of violence, potent atmosphere and some juicy character portraits from a robust cast.
