Movie review: Lawless ***

Stars: Shia LaBeouf, Mia Wasikowska, Guy Pearce, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain
Director: John Hillcoat
Rated: R
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, September 21 - Friday-Saturday 7:30pm; Sunday 5:30pm; Monday-Thursday 7:00pm. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 110 minutes
Crime/drama/western

As anybody who’s watched The Discovery Channel knows, if you’re looking for moonshine, the place to start is in the foothills of south central and southwest Virginia. As the new movie Lawless makes clear, 'shine was never a passing fancy among the folk there. It’s a tradition that goes back generations.

Lawless is based on Matt Bondurant’s The Wettest County in the World, a historical novel spun out of Bondurant’s Franklin County, Va., moonshiner-ancestors. Bondurant whipped up a war between the local off-the-books distillers and the Prohibition-era Chicago mob, which aimed to take over the lucrative illegal liquor trade, from production to distribution.

The Bondurants are led by Forrest (Tom Hardy), the tough-minded World War I vet who formed the family legend that the Bondurants are “indestructible”. His wild-eyed brother Howard (Jason Clarke) seems to second that notion.

It’s only younger brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) who seems vulnerable.

He reads the newspapers and idolizes gangsters. He has a taste for fancy clothes and fancy convertible roadsters. It’s just that he’s not tough enough to get them.

So he sets out to change that. He’ll hook up with a mobster (Gary Oldman) laying low nearby. He’ll make his own deals.

And when Forrest is put out of commission by one of his many battles with the other unsavouries, Jack has his chance.

A dapper, sadistic Chicago mobster (Guy Pearce) has arrived to help the Real Mob take control of the business, with the aid of the local prosecutor. Charlie Rakes wears bow ties and gloves and a little too much cologne. But don’t call him “Nancy”. He takes such aspersions personally.

The proper ingredients are here to cook up a fine backwoods liquor war tale. The archetypes are broad and obvious, the violence is shocking, unflinching and in your face. But Aussie director John Hillcoat (The Road) and rocker-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave deliver a movie that never finds the right tone. It’s alternately grim and bemused. Too many tough guys tell other tough guys “LOOK at me” too many times.

All those elements conspire to render Lawless inauthentic, a movie pulled together by a lot of folks who had no feel for the setting or the story they were telling.

Next attraction: TBA