Starred Up

STARRED UP             B-                   

Great Britain  (106 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  David Mackenzie         Official site

A highly acclaimed British prison drama shot by an independent minded Scottish film director, the maker of YOUNG ADAM (2002) and HALLAM FOE (2007), one that uses a grim, ultra realistic style featuring ferocious acting, but at the same time stretches credulity, seemingly in contrast with one another, where many viewers will be scratching their heads wondering why violent criminals are contained in such a seemingly lax prison environment, as so much of the depiction of endless violence inside the prison is simply never contained, where there never seems to be appropriate consequences for obvious violations.  As the film is actually shot in the unused correctional center of HM Prison Maze in Belfast, Northern Ireland, closed since September 29, 2000, the irony is not lost on the viewers, as this was the site of the notorious 1981 Irish hunger strike when ten Irish political prisoners starved themselves to death, including Bobby Sands, who was a Member of Parliament at the time  The reason for his imprisonment was the possession of a handgun, for which he was sentenced to fourteen years in maximum security prison, some of which was spent naked while in solitary confinement, whose life was depicted with stunning clarity by British director Steve McQueen in HUNGER (2008).  This film initially has the feel of authenticity, adapted from a screenplay by Jonathan Asser who worked as a voluntary prison therapist at HM Prison Wandsworth in London, home of some of the country’s most violent criminals.  The title of the film represents the prison terminology used when they transfer a youth offender to an adult prison unit, in this case teenage Eric Love (Jack O’Connell), a troubled kid from working class London with a violently abusive past.  However, nothing is known about him in the opening except he is a new prisoner, where the attention to detail is meticulously accurate, where he is forced to strip, his body inspected for contraband, and given a prison uniform to wear.  This begins a long, extended walk in real time that couldn’t be more precisely choreographed, wordlessly unlocking one set of doors while closing and locking the door behind, perhaps asking him to step forward, repeating the process again and again as a guard leads him through an elaborate maze of endless locked doors and empty walkways before finally arriving to his solitary cell.  The degree of locked down order and professionalism maintained in this sequence quickly erodes, where the conditions inside eventually descend into chaos and madness.  While it never reaches the heights of Jacques Audiard’s unflinching, near documentary realism in 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), and is near unintelligible (no subtitles) due to the non-stop use of profanity and heavily accented slang, MacKenzie nonetheless creates a bleak portrait of conflicting prison interests. 

This kid doesn’t waste any time and immediately gets to work melting the handle of his toothbrush where he’s smuggled a razor blade, molding the blade into the handle as a makeshift knife, immediately hiding it in the florescent lighting fixture on the ceiling.  This sequence has a Bressonian feel to it that’s told in a worldless rhythm defined by this particular environmental space, where he calmly measures each move even as internally he is emotionally rocked by this major change in his life.  By morning, he’s already verbally sparring with another large black inmate, where a bit of name calling will likely lead to predictable results, where it appears he intentionally picked this fight, publically, and in front of all the other inmates.  Taking his food to his cell, he lies in wait afterwards, pretending he is sleeping.  When another black prisoner from across the hall walks into his open cell, Eric springs from the bed and viciously attacks him, knocking him out with a single blow, dragging the man to the end of the hallway where the guards can provide medical treatment.  It’s little more than profanity being spewed back and forth between the prisoner and the guards, where no one simply talks, instead they shout and intimidate, where every act is a threat, using unintelligible slang that seems to define an unbalanced prison state of belligerence, where being a little mental can be used to one’s advantage.  By the time the guards enter his cell with riot gear, he fends them off with the broken legs of a wooden desk, using them as clubs, waving them in the air like a maniac.  Even after he’s apparently subdued, he chomps down on a guard’s testicles like a pitbull, eventually leading to a standoff, but only after a prison counselor Oliver (Rupert Friend) insists that he attend group therapy, “I can reach him,” he pleads, seemingly locking heads over the issue with Deputy Warden Hayes (Sam Spruell) who gives his permission.  Unlike Destin Cretton’s equally gut-wrenching Short Term 12 (2013), where there is a clear line between administrators and supervisory staff, not always in agreement but the film adequately explains the differing perspectives, this film makes no attempt whatsoever to provide any rational view of the administrators in charge of the prison, and instead turns them into bigger monsters than the prisoners themselves, modeled apparently after Cruella De Vil, as their criminally heinous acts throughout are nothing less than villainous.  It is surprising, however, to see female guards in an all-male prison facility that is this violent, where the head administrator is a big-bosomed, cruel-intentioned blond woman (Sian Breckin), using Hayes to run interference in the trenches for her. 

It’s a half-hour into the film before we discover a major revelation, curiously revealed by Eric’s improbable exploration into another inmate’s cell on the same wing where he finds a drawing he made as a child crudely showing a young child standing alongside his mother and father, all holding hands, with the inscription, “I Love you daddy.”  Meet Eric’s father, Neville Love, Ben Mendelsohn, an Australian actor from David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010), separated from Eric at the age of 5, who adds something of a psychotic presence to an already hysterical prison environment, as his hair-trigger temper and propensity for violence makes him one of the lifers, his sentence extended as he apparently killed another prisoner, where he represents the hardened view of an inmate that will never see the light of day.  Eric, on the other hand, has only five years to serve and he’s free, his Dad reminds him, so he needs to cooperate and keep his hands clean, urging him to listen and follow instructions in therapy, which is little more than anger management sessions, though Eric does eventually acknowledge he was abused by a pedophile at the age of 10, where prisoners may become unhinged and subject to making vicious assaults when verbally provoked, where standing up for yourself isn’t so much a choice but a mandatory prerequisite to staying alive.  Eric, however, has little regard for the rules and remains out of control throughout, trashing his own cell as well as others, assaulting multiple guards, cutting up another inmate’s face, yet has free reign to wander the place at will with little, if any, consequences for his actions.  This defies belief, where the film is not without its flaws and has a clear ideological agenda, pitting the idealistic motives of the “volunteer” unpaid prison therapist, whose unconventional motives suggest his own dark past, against the more corrupt aims of the embattled administration that holds no hope whatsoever in the idea of prisoner rehabilitation, and instead routinely covers up their own treacherous crimes of targeting certain incorrigibles with murder faked to look like suicides.  When Hayes decides to implement such a plan against Eric, his father Neville goes ballistic, forced to fight through a battle royale of prison guards standing in his way to finally get to his son, which despite the authentic tone throughout adamantly strains belief, turning this into a kind of superhero prison drama, where the prisoners continually exert their moral and physical superiority over the continually outmanned and overwhelmed prison system that is crushed by the weight of its own ineptitude.  While the performances throughout are stellar, this grim and tightly edited drama literally makes the audience choke on the suffocating conditions, graphically raw and intense, never allowing the transcendent release of Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un Condamné à Mort s'est échappé) (1956), continually tightening the screws, allowing no space to breathe in this taut prison thriller.  

The Rover

 
 

David Michôd (left) on the set with his two stars

THE ROVER            B+               
Australia  USA  (102 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  David Michôd       Official site

You should never stop thinking about a life you’ve taken. That’s the price you pay for taking it. 

—Eric (Guy Pearce)

Following the brilliance of his earlier film Animal Kingdom (2010), one has come to expect great things from this Australian director, who has turned to a particular style of end of the world, post-apocalyptic film that continues the tradition of fellow Aussies George Miller, who introduced us to the nihilist universe of MAD MAX (1979), but also John Hillcoat, whose equally impressive films The Proposition (2005), as well as his vision of Cormac McCarthy’s death march in The Road (2009), both happen to feature the star of this film, Guy Pearce.  It was Pearce, along with fellow Australian actor Russell Crowe that broke onto the scene with utterly exhilarating performances in the Hollywood film noir thriller LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), where Crowe went on to become a big star, now reduced to something of a caricature of himself, while Pearce has continued to do stellar work all along.  This film is impossible to imagine without him in mind, as it’s largely a wordless, nightmarish, apocalyptic vision taking place in a barren Australian wasteland set “10 years after the collapse,” with no more specifics ever provided.  Don’t get to your seats late as what happens early determines the rhythm and tone of the entire film, as Eric (Pearce) wanders into a lone bar in the middle of nowhere, a quiet, dusty hole in the wall.  But through the window, we see a truck barreling down the highway upside down, where the bloodied occupants crawl out afterwards, and like parasites stealing other bodies as hosts, these three outlaws break into Eric’s car and drive off into the emptiness of the outback.  Being the enterprising person that he is, Eric is able to get their truck unentangled and goes off after them.  After a brief exchange on the road, where all Eric wants is his car back, he’s instead left for dead on the highway as the outlaws continue on their path to oblivion.  Things fall apart even further after that, like a trek into the heart of darkness, where civilization as we once knew it has all but disappeared, and what’s left is a savage graveyard of dead bodies and souls, where killing people is the best way of getting what you want, as words are a mere afterthought.   What describes this film best is the strange and eerie musical soundtrack by Antony Partos (who also scored Animal Kingdom), much of which sounds like industrial noise, but it has the capacity to reflect the altered sense of consciousness that pervades throughout this dusty landscape, certainly as effective as the legendary music by Ennio Morricone in Sergio Leone films, but supercharged with creepy effects. 

Introduced through a flashback sequence, Robert Pattinson as Rey is similarly left for dead on the roadside, and though badly wounded, he crawls into a vehicle until unable to continue.  By a strange act of fate, these two are mysteriously brought together in the vast emptiness, as Rey recognizes the car Eric is driving, claiming it belongs to his brother.  Eric demands to know where his brother is, but doesn’t get far after giving him a crushing blow that only knocks him out.  Driving into a surreal abyss, with dead bodies strung onto the passing telephone poles, it’s a precautionary reminder of what to expect if one ventures further, like a ghoulish nightmare.  A visit to another weird stop on the road leads him to a somewhat deranged grandmother (Gillian Jones) who passes as the madam in a dingy brothel, who can’t seem to understand why he’s so intent on finding his car, “What a thing to get worked up about in this day and age,” where Eric picks up some weaponry, but at a heavy price.  The menacing tone exists throughout the film, made even more pronounced when Rey comes to, where we discover he’s something of a half-wit, viewed initially as little more than a mangy dog left on the side of the road after being hit by a car, but slowly a more resilient personality begins to take shape, almost by surprise, but not until after Eric discovers the whereabouts of a doctor, a woman living in the outback (Susan Prior), where one of the more somber scenes in the film is watching Eric stumble upon a room with a dozen or so dogs in cages, where he sits and stares at them, identifying with their state of captivity and their loss of freedom, but they’re alive, all abandoned by their owners who disappeared into the night never to return.  After another horrific scenario plays out, a continuing pattern that recurs throughout the movie, breaking the mood of what is otherwise a movie set in quiet and near silence, Eric brings his recovering patient along as they barrel down the highway into the bleakness of the night.  While they presumably have a destination, as Rey’s condition improves, he freely acknowledges where his brother is likely to be, Henry (Scoot McNairy), and his two cohorts Caleb (Tawanda Maryimo) and Archie (David Field), as he’s just as curious about finding them, especially after they abandoned him.   

Though they’re on the road for most of the picture, the film is not so much a road movie, more a depiction of gruesome, neverending horror, where the grim circumstances never relent, shown without any trace of humor, but as time goes on, the movie delves into the psychological interiors of the two men, both considerably damaged, though Rey’s mental confusion makes him comparable to Lennie from Steinbeck’s depression novel Of Mice and Men, seen here as a kind of caged animal that doesn’t know his own strength, who is instead constantly viewed through the fragility of his mental weakness.  At one point he’s rambling on in the car about his farmer neighbors, this after learning Eric was a farmer before the collapse, until he’s rudely interrupted by Eric wondering why he’s telling him all this personal crap, and Rey meekly retorts, “Not everything has to be about something.”  The movie comes to reflect the shifting tones between these two characters, where there are subtle changes in their feelings toward each other, where the audience is drawn into this as well, as initially the focus is upon the heroic aspects of Eric, seen as a lone warrior against an out of control wilderness, but slowly the viewer takes an interest in the more vulnerable Rey, whose crazed ramblings may reflect the last vestiges of humanity.  What’s intriguing about Rey is his need for companionship, where he’s afraid of being left alone, where he’s the kind of guy that can’t decide anything for himself, as he needs to be told what to do.  In one of the more hypnotic moments of the film, in the still of night, while the two are sitting by a campfire, Eric intently tells Rey not just what awful things have happened to him, but what God has done to him, stripping through the layers, exposing his real fears, leaving him utterly defenseless to the kind of pain that is ripping the earth apart.  It’s the closest we come to the kind of excruciating pain and anguish, which is all that’s left in the world.  This film at least attempts to do what Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), for instance, fails to do, which is get in touch with the end stages of human emotions once the realization is made that all is lost.  Rey has a flashback moment where the car radio plays Keri Hilson - Pretty Girl Rock - YouTube (4:14), a reminder of the superficial vanity that once was, an era consumed by mindless impulses and myopic convictions, replaced by a vast wasteland where there’s nobody left that cares.  As bleak as they get, this all takes place under the scorching 110 degree heat of the Australian outback with flies everywhere, shot where it’s 9-hours by car in any direction to the nearest civilization.  Michôd is excellent in creating a world that is frighteningly unforgiving and cruel, yet portrayed through realism and raw emotions, where every last character has become alienated from their former humanity, suggesting how easy it is for civilization to simply disappear off the face of the earth.  Something of a concept film, reminiscent of those 50’s novels where nuclear fallout would inevitably destroy the world, like Alas, Babylon, On the Beach, Level 7, or Fail-Safe, here one’s worst fears have already become realized and there’s simply no answer for the neverending sadness that greets each empty moment with an all-consuming silence. 

Animal Kingdom

ANIMAL KINGDOM            A-       

Australia  (112 mi)  2010   ‘Scope  d:  David Michôd

I'm lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
I know you hurt too but what else can we do
Tormented and torn apart

I wish I could carry your smile and my heart
For times when my life feels so low
It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring
When today doesn't really know, doesn't really know

Chorus:
I 'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I 'm all out of love, what am I without you
I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong

I want you to come back and carry me home
Away from this long lonely nights
I'm reaching for you, are you feeling it too
Does the feeling seem oh so right

And what would you say if I called on you now
And said that I can't hold on
There's no easy way, it gets harder each day
Please love me or I'll be gone…I'll be gone

Chorus
I 'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I 'm all out of love, what am I without you
I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong

—“All Out of Love” from the album Lost in Love, by Air Supply (1980), Air Supply - All Out Of Love - YouTube (3:50)

When was the last time there were not one, or two, but three brilliant films to come out of Sundance capable of being called Top Fifteen films of the year?  Umm…never.   

"Winter's Bone" (Grand Jury Prize Dramatic), #3

"Animal Kingdom" (World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic), #11

"Restrepo" (Grand Jury Prize Documentary), #14

A bit like Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), only this one’s told from the perspective of life on the outside instead of life on the inside of prison.  Using a spare narration from a dull, socially inept, oversized teenaged kid, James Frecheville as Joshua, who in the opening sequence waits for the paramedics to arrive too late to help his overdosed mother.  This begins his journey with his new family, career bank robbers seen in a crime spree captured in black and white surveillance photos over the opening credits, who happen to be his uncles all living under the care of their notorious mother, Grandma Cody (Jacki Weaver), otherwise known as Mother Smurf, who has a face like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a constant smile etched on her face, a woman who just wants to be around “the boys” wherever they are and whatever they may be doing.  She is hilarious every time she instructs these cold-blooded criminals to give her a hug, as she feels she’s the emotional backbone of the family, keeping their volatile tempers under control.  Joshua is more an observer or innocent bystander who just happens to be there, as he could just as easily be anywhere, so nothing seems out of the ordinary to him as these are his relatives.  When he gets his first taste of what a gun can do, it’s more amusing than anything else, as no one gets hurt, but the gun certainly makes other hardened outlaws back off, which for his uncles is mere child’s play.  Without ever saying much, his quiet nature soon begins to arouse the suspicion of his uncles, exacerbated by their own insane paranoia that comes from excessive cocaine use, where they wonder who he might be talking to.  As the family is under 24-hour police surveillance, these nagging suspicions only grow more irritable over time.  When the police bring the whole family in for questioning, their paranoia goes overboard, thinking he’s just a kid, but he may be a weak link.  Interesting that this is another hair-raising story about a teenager who through no fault of their own becomes unwillingly initiated into the nightmarish adult world of their criminal families, which is the exact same subject of the other Sundance film, Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone.  Each play out, however, as differently as possible.  Both are unflinching portraits of a criminal underworld rarely seen, this is tough and hard-edged, while Granik’s rural, outsider approach is more poetic and character-driven. 

The foreboding opening narration is wise beyond Joshua’s years, as he remarks “Crooks always come undone, always, one way or another,” which may as well be the intro to Kubrick’s meticulously unraveling perfect heist movie THE KILLING (1956).  He soon realizes why his mother kept him away from her family.  What we witness is a slow changing of the mood, where the arrogant confidence of the boys is replaced by the foul play of revengeful police work, where the police don’t play by the rules any more than the criminals do, which leads to small cracks in the armor, the first evidence of tiny quirks or idiosyncrasies, as behavior slowly becomes more erratic until eventually, for some, the blood begins to boil.  Innocently enough, Joshua finds a high school girlfriend, Nicole (Laura Wheelwright), whose family provides him a safe haven and a meal from time to time.  Bringing her home to the boys starts one of the best sequences in the film, as they’re simply sitting around on the couch to Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” (Air Supply - All Out Of Love) playing on the television, which perfectly describes the world spinning out of control around them, especially when Nicole is under the constant gaze of Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), the most sociopathic of the uncles, a man in hiding from the cops whose grasp of reality demands that the world must submit to him.  Next to him, the rest of the family could be considered ideal neighbors, as they keep their illicit drug activity strictly indoors.  But boys will be boys, and like a pack of wild dogs, eventually they turn on each other.  This film is about how it’s impossible to remain out of their grasp, despite Joshua’s best efforts to remain neutral, as evidenced by the use of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” (Jimmy Cliff - Sitting In Limbo), as throughout, inert and silent, always under watchful eyes, he appears to be just a kid.  But one of the police captains (Guy Pearce) takes a special interest in Joshua, trying to become a father figure, trying to build his trust, all of which just pisses off his intemperate uncles even more.    

While it’s an unusual story about an unforgiving world, a pup growing up raised by a pack of wolves, Michôd’s ballsy and stylishly inventive way of telling the story adds a remarkable intensity throughout, as from the very start he pulls you into this world where it appears there’s no way out, slowly becoming more psychologically brutal, edited with a near perfect precision, using an exquisitely eerie sound design from Sam Petty, ominous electronic music from Antony Partos, slow-motion montages and a constantly moving camera from cinematographer Adam Arkapaw that seems to creep around the interior rooms wherever it goes, sometimes appearing as if out of nowhere, building up an extremely taut atmosphere of suspense, never knowing what monster will jump out of the dark.  It’s a disturbing film where everything we see falls under a cloud of dread and anxiety, where we can feel the nightmarish tension in the air, even as we are witness to moments of extreme horror.  They are not played out for graphic display, but are shown as it is, human beings capable of the most coldly calculated behavior, where the tension is ratcheted up to a fever pitch.  The deglamorized portrayal of Joshua’s family is nothing less than bone chilling, but it’s Joshua’s mood that needs to find a balance, that teeter totters between the protection of the police, as represented by Pearce, who ignores or is in denial over the murderous provocation within his own department, or the protection of his family, which is like sending a lamb into the lion’s den.  Either way, nothing appears safe.  But this is a keenly observant film that allows the initially apathetic Joshua the ability to show good instincts and make smart decisions, so as we follow his every move, we get into the constantly probing mindset of a teenage kid in desperate trouble.  Briskly paced, until the final moments, the audience never has a clear idea what’s going to happen other than it likely won’t be good.  There’s an everpresent dour tone, but also random moments of absurdity and humor, which when added to the menacing atmosphere of suspense make this an intensely appealing, yet utterly creepy film experience. 

The Town

THE TOWN                B                     

USA  (123 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Ben Affleck

A film that seems to be an anthem to Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood known for its generational proclivity for armed robbery and car thieves, that is told with such a solemn tone that is bears a resemblance to Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002), which became an homage to 9/11 in New York City, as in both films, there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the terrible price of lives lost, yet there’s also a lyrical upswing, as both feature oddly poetic gestures of hope, of a world that could somehow be just a little bit better.  First and foremost, the film is beautifully immersed in Affleck’s home town, his one true love, the working class neighborhoods of Boston, which is such a prominent element of the film that it’s significant that they got it right, that it doesn’t in any way look glamorized.  This provides the film with needed authenticity, as everything else that happens is from within this structure.  Affleck’s got his house in order here, and so too are his actors, which amazingly includes a first rate performance by the director himself, probably the best in his career, but also his supporting cast, where the most suspenseful scene in the film is an otherwise uneventful lunch with his partner in crime Jeremy Renner, who is so completely unpredictable and close to beserk that he channels the manic energy of James Cagney, a psychotic hoodlum with a sadistic streak.  The twist here is that the film is a profile of a group of professional bank robbers and thieves, whose intimate portrait is usually reserved for the good guys, but here the cops and the FBI are the so-called bad guys, as the real bad guys are given such favorable onscreen treatment.  There’s a precedent set for this by Matt Damon in the BOURNE TRILOGY (2002 – 2007), but the set-up there is that he’s a trained assassin who can’t recollect his past, but discovers the secret service from his own country is trying to kill him, creating a razzle dazzle of action sequences where one needs a scorecard to tell the good guys from the bad.  Here Jon Hamm plays the malicious FBI agent in charge who comes across as the heavy, as he’s continually twisting arms in an attempt to crack the solidarity among thieves who continuously look out for one another, using less than subtle techniques in order to make his arrest.  Early on he knows who the crooks are, which he figures out pretty easily, but he hasn’t a shred of evidence to nail anyone.  

This is a white knuckles bank heist thriller that moves with electrifying energy, that shows with meticulous precision how heavy weapons can prevail in a bank robbery, how people are compliant when a gun gets stuck in their faces, as the overriding concern under the immediate circumstances is not the bank, but that no one wants to die.  This film shows how easily one arrives at that heart pumping moment when you’d do anything to comply.  In a well executed heist, this takes about ten seconds, at which point it’s up to the robber’s sophistication to find out how to get the maximum reward in the least amount of time.  This particular crew is shrewd at covering their tracks, confident they are leaving no evidence behind, as their skill set in their profession is near brilliant.  All throughout though we’re expected to believe these are just a couple of boys from the block.  There are more changes of professional uniforms shown here in the course of their dirty business that by the end, one wonders where the telephone booth is that Clark Kent uses to change into Superman.  Any team this good would probably have mob connections, but this appears to be a ragtag bunch of guys from the old neighborhood who just happen to have grown up together.  Chris Cooper excels in a scene as Affleck’s father in prison, where the generational ties run deep, yet he exudes a fatherly anger and despair at his helplessness to change his circumstances.  In one of the best scenes, the police pull them all in for questioning, where Affleck recognizes a local cop from the neighborhood, asking that cop what he would call someone who grew up in a poor but close-knit neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s secrets and then used that information to put away as many of them behind bars as possible?  This is followed by macho maneuvering by the FBI where Affleck instantly realizes they have nothing on him.  But this is the heart of the film, as neighborhoods are comprised of friends with well kept secrets, which is why they remain friends.  In Charlestown, everyone has secrets, as everyone knows somebody that’s affiliated with crime. 

While this is a character study of a criminal group psychology, it also shows Affleck as a conflicted and unwilling participant, as after awhile he wants out, where there’s something of a hugely contrived love story at the center of all this with Rebecca Hall, where he envisions a different life for himself through his connection with her, where thoughts run through his mind similar to Brian Cox’s dream sequence spoken to his son Monty (Ed Norton) at the end of 25th HOUR, where a single decision could affect the rest of his lifetime, as it could literally reconnect an entirely new set of possibilities.  Much of this turns out to be Affleck fighting as much with his own partners, who don’t want him to leave, as with his condemned soul, where he’s trying to find a redemptive path.  This doesn’t have nearly the punch or the redemptive poetry of the Spike Lee film, one of his best, especially coming so soon after 9/11, but Affleck does generate astonishing suspense, as these guys are always on the alert for getting caught, always living on the edge where something could go wrong at any moment, yet the audience is mesmerized by the brilliantly well executed heist sequences and the frantic car chases which are among the best on celluloid, though in typical Hollywood fashion one notices for all the bullets flying, few people get shot.  It’s a surprisingly well-paced film throughout, entertaining as hell, leaving an ambiguity at the end which may be challenging for the audience, as it can be a bit confusing telling the good guys from the bad.  Even with Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009), we knew he was a bad guy, a crook with a heartless soul, but Affleck’s character is still left struggling for his, as if there’s the slightest possibility that he could turn into a decent guy, even when all the evidence points otherwise.  This sleight of hand trick may work for some, as a good lead performance can charm the pants off of anyone, but the real talent here is not in any real character development, as in the much superior Australian film ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010), but in the kinetic energy displayed in the chase sequences mixed in with the suspense of some daredevil heists.