fatvegan

I saw Rise of the Footsoldier yesterday. It's been a good few days for films. It's about the only good thing about being sick. Drinking a lot of tea is perhaps the only other one.

The film wasn't too bad. It was a bit of a hodge podge of violence and sex scenes. The violence I found pretty interesting and it didn't pull many punches. But the sex, which I think was meant to be near the heart of the story, was a bit random and poorly directed.

The characters were kind of appalling. It seems like a bit of a tendency with gangster films to have heads of drug cartels and mob groups that appear totally imcompetent and childish. Towards the end the film focused on a trio of mobsters who were meant to be "pretty powerful in the drug scene" in London. But they were totally ridiculous. It was hard to figure out if they were gang leaders or free lance thugs for hire.

Another thing I've noticed about gangster films is the inconsistency with which they treat horror. For instance, in this film, to illustrate just how diabolical one fellow was they showed him throwing a cup of hot coffee in the face of another fellow at a soccer match. It was a nice little scene, but it could hardly be compared to most of what followed. There was a was later scene where the film's main protagonist hammers a bunch of nails through a fellow's arms and legs while he's alive. That's presented as a good-humoured coming of age type experience for the main character.

Some fairly horrific stuff happens throughout the film and most of it is presented in a jovial, aren't-gangsters-rascals type way. This has some potential moral issues perhaps, but is reasonable enough I think. What I find strange is how arbitrarily gangsters films appear to attach significance to certain behaviours. Towards the end three gangsters are killed fairly merrily while they're driving through the country. It's just a conventional shotgun-through-the-car-door sort of group assassination, but the movie treats it as some appalling watershed in the history of gangsterdom. And I feel like these movies do that all the time.

I suspect it has a bit to do with how closely certain events are modelled on documented history and how much they are urban legend. The murders at the end were documented and in the news a lot, but I think most of the other stuff in the film was second-hand stories about the main character who was also based on a real person. What is really bizarre is that the psychopath who nailed the bloke to the floor is the voice of reason and measure throughout the film. He's the one telling others to tone things down and not to overreact. This isn't totally in-your-face ridiculous, but is totally incongruous in the context of the whole film.

It was good though. Even if it felt like something of a montage of British gangster cliches more than an actual story.