DEAD MAN’S SHOES
Visceral but tender revenge thriller marking Shane Meadowsõ arrival
WISH FULFILMENT AND harsh reality combine in Shane Meadows’ merciless story of revenge and regret, following paratrooper Richard (Paddy Considine), who returns to his hometown to hunt down a gang of drug-dealing thugs who abused his younger brother (Toby Kebbell).
“You know when someone belittles you, but you’re too shocked to do anything about it?” co-writer and star Considine told Empire back on its October 2004 release. “And then maybe a week later you’ll think, ‘Why the fuck didn’t I smash his face in?’ Well, that’s what [my character] Richard’s like, except he’s lived with those thoughts for so long, he simply can’t not act on them any more. Anger is in his bones.”
Anger was part of what fuelled the film’s making, too. Meadows shot it after Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, an amiable urban Western he perhaps underrates, though there’s no denying he had a miserable time making it, answering to what felt like an army of executives. Dead Man’s Shoes, with its stripped-down aesthetic and streamlined production process, was the antidote to that. Forget endless rewrites and committeefilmmaking: college friends Meadows and Considine wrote the script in eight days (hilariously, this brutally violent and desolate picture started out as a comedy). The director first discussed it with producer Mark Herbert in March 2003. They were shooting by May. There was — in a massive and refreshing change from the vast majority of experiences in the film industry — no fuckabout time. Meadows said it was, creatively, “like a kind of rebirth, really”. It led to This Is England and his transition to emotionally engrossing television — culminating in The Virtues, 2019’s extraordinary story of abuse and survival.
Perhaps inevitably, given it follows an ex-forces figure on a kill-spree, Dead Man’s Shoes drew comparisons with Taxi Driver, but Considine’s character has more justified hurt than Travis Bickle, more evidence of a soul steeled by circumstance. It’s a film that combines Meadows’ knowledge and love of genre cinema — from
Death Wish to First Blood — with an intense sense of place and people. Considine is the angry everyman, everywhere — knowing the person he really needs to escape is himself.
IF EX MACHINA isn’t a horror film, it definitely feels like one. Alex Garland certainly gives us much to be scared of. Fear of technology. Fear of monitoring and data-tracking. Fear of the future. Fear of a psychotic Oscar Isaac. Fear of killer robots. Fear of your sexual attraction to killer robots. It’s all there.
Garland was already something of a geek hero, having sold a gazillion copies of his debut novel The Beach before switching to screenwriting with 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd. But Ex Machina, his directorial debut, was Garland unleashed, an unfettered vision that shot his worldview through our veins and showed us what he could do when he was fully in charge of a film. A misanthropic morality tale, it mused on not just artificial intelligence but the foolishness of young men, gave us cinema’s most sinister disco dance, and presented an audacious twist on the femme fatale with Ava, an AI robot inhabited by an alluring, creepy Alicia Vikander. “Is it strange to have made something that hates you?” she asks Nathan, her deluded, fascistic creator. On every level, Ex Machina gave us the shivers.
It was exciting to watch a piece of science fiction that was so clearly one person’s vision, unencumbered by studio demands. Garland had had to make compromises before, or at least found himself butting heads with collaborators’ ideas, feeding in and out of other people’s plans, and Ex Machina was him beginning again, setting out his stall, showing us how he saw the world (clue: we’re in trouble).
Despite its conceit, and despite all the research that undoubtedly went into it, the film is not overly cerebral. Garland doesn’t patronise his audience, but at the same time presses all the right buttons.
Ex Machina intelligently explores an ever frightening scenario without getting lost in itself. Garland likes his thrills and spills, expertly baking them into his plot, and this is full of them as it hurtles towards its inevitably gloomy (depending on where you stand) climax. Underneath it all, it’s a traditional and extremely effective genre blast. Garland is, ultimately, a crowd-pleaser.