Welcome
To The Punch
Brit
bullet ballet
James
McAvoy is
everywhere right now. Currently
treading the boards in London, he’s a post-apocalyptic Macbeth haunting Trafalgar Studios. He keeps popping up on British chat shows sporting varying
degrees of beard and being twinkly, charming and lovely. And he’s got a bunch of films coming
out over the next few months.
We’ll see him as the dodgiest of dodgy coppers in Scotland’s answer to Bad
Lieutenant,
director Jon S. Baird’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Filth. He’ll also be the hapless amnesiac within whose head lurks a
fortune in Danny Boyle’s convoluted, twisty, turny, shouty new film Trance. But first up he’s a tortured, driven cop out to catch Mark
Strong’s
vengeful ex-gangster in writer/director Eran Creevy’s ferocious, Hong Kong-style
bullet ballet, Welcome To The Punch.
When
his son is shot during a botched drug deal, former armed robber Jacob Sternwood
(Mark Strong),
in hiding in Iceland, returns to London determined to find out what happened in
the process giving burnt-out cop Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) one last chance to catch
him. Years earlier, during a
multi-million pound heist, Sternwood shot and wounded the ambitious Lewinsky
while making his escape, almost ending the young cop’s career, and now Max is
out for revenge. But as Sternwood
closes in on his son’s killers and Max closes in on Sternwood, the two men find
themselves forced to put aside their personal vendetta as they uncover a deadly
conspiracy and must work together to destroy a common enemy.
The
film that Nick Love’s ponderous, lumbering The Sweeney desperately wanted to be, Welcome To
The Punch
hits the ground running with a furious chase sequence that sets the scene for
the 90-odd minutes of muscular action and mayhem that follows. A quantum leap in style from the gritty
social realism of his debut film, the urban drama Shifty (which also featured the
wonderful Daniel Mays and Jason Flemyng), Creevy brings the hi-octane, stylised violence and themes
of Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed genre to a neon-splashed, London that wouldn’t
look out of place in a Michael Mann film, paring the backstory to the bone to
create a lean, mean, pulse-pounding thriller that retains a decidedly British
feel in amongst the beautifully choreographed gunplay (a particular highlight
being the Mexican stand-off and subsequent slo-mo shoot-out in a pensioner’s
front room).
As
the morally complex antiheroes, McAvoy and Strong are excellent; Strong
bringing a silence and an almost glacial stillness to his honourable gangster
that’s magnetic to watch while McAvoy’s nervy, pill-popping cop is a ball of
restless fury, constantly in motion (even if hampered by an Estuary accent. What? There’s no Scots coppers in London?), and there’s strong
support from the likes of Peter Mullan, Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey and
Johnny Harris.
The
real stars of the film though are Creevy and his cinematographer Ed Wild who
deliver a moody, icy blue, widescreen vision of London as a nocturnal Hell, the
characters dwarfed by the cold steel, diamond glass and concrete of Canary
Wharf and Docklands, a hostile, unforgiving arena that’s the perfect backdrop
for the film’s intense, beautiful carnage.
Slick,
sleek and ambitious, Welcome To The Punch is top drawer Saturday night
entertainment.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
James McAvoy,
Mark Strong,
Johnny Harris Peter Mullan,
Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey and Daniel Mays
Genres:
Action,
Adventure, Crime, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 39
minutes
Certificate:
15
Rating:
UK
Cinema Release Date:
Friday
15th March
No comments:
Post a Comment