Dead Man Down – Film Review
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Dominic Cooper and Terence Howard
Released: 3 May, 2013
Considering Oplev’s last project was the exceedingly excellent The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, you expect a high level of quality for his new film, Dead Man Down. The fact that ‘Dead Man Down’ is such a ridiculous title was something I found easy to dismiss, self-assured that the high standard of story-telling and drama would more than compensate for a nonsensical Hollywood buzzword of a title. As it happens, the title is far from this films only flaw…
The plot revolves around Alphonse (Howard), a crime lord who has been receiving death threats and intimidating messages from an anonymous stalker. He has some of his best men investigating the source, including the ambitious Darcy (Cooper) and the sullen Victor (Farrell), who is in fact the man behind it all. Over the course of his delicate operation, Victor is compromised by his neighbor Beatrice (Rapace), who has her own plans for him.
On paper, this sounds like an utterly winning story, full of intrigue, tension and exciting plot twists. The cruel reality of it, however, is that the single paragraph above is stretched impossibly thin by entirely unnecessary scenes, uninspired action and one of the most painfully dull romantic sub-plots in recent memory. It is devastating to see a director, with such indisputable talent, falling into a lethargic slump such as this.
To begin with, the casting is woeful. Colin Farrell is a talented enough actor, but depicting a po-faced, Hungarian recluse? Everyone has their limits and that is simply a persona that he will ever be able to embody. His attempts to come across as cold and professional in his dealings are just utterly unconvincing. It is clear that we’re supposed to be rooting for him, seeing him as a broken anti-hero, but he just comes across as wooden. Worse still, many characters, including Alphonse and Darcy, all seem to have pre-established friendships with him that feel like they should fall apart like wet cardboard if put under the kind of strain seen here.
Howard, as Alphonse, is similarly miscast, purely unable to convey any sense of menace like he should. Uninspired performances of mob bosses or crime lords tend to emanate a mere sense of lazy domination, but he doesn’t even manage that! If it weren’t blatantly stated, Alphonse could easily be mistaken here for a lawyer or office executive. Cooper, as Darcy, on the other hand, is one of the few people who actually feels right for the role. He is somewhat sleazy, yet with an honorable streak running through him that lifts his character out of standard archetype. He is genuinely engaging when onscreen, but sadly his role is barely relevant to the plot. His one and only real function is to inject a moral lesson into an otherwise senseless action drama.
The use of the term action drama is intentional. Such a film would generally fall into the category of ‘Thriller’, but there is little about this film that is in any way thrilling. There is action, but these sequences, with one exception, are invariably tacked on for the sake of exposition and therefore feel divorced from the rest of the film. The rest of the time, we are watching Victor looking broody, or cringing at his relationship with Beatrice.
Ah, Beatrice….what to say about her? She was probably once an interesting character, of this there can be little doubt. Yet, something must have gone terribly, terribly wrong while her character was in the development stages. Unlike your typical love interest, she has been ‘horribly’ scarred in an initially unmentioned accident. How this affects her daily life is interesting in itself, yet the focus rarely remains on her more intriguing aspects. One scene in which she is at work (at a beauty parlor) sees her making some ‘mistakes’ on a customer, which are fascinating in a squeamish sort of way, but then swiftly moves to get back to the more ‘action-y’ bits. Far more attention is paid to her relationship with Farrell, which is so dismally forced and lacking in chemistry that it could almost be mistaken for parody. Even her relationship with her mother (a wonderfully quirky Isabelle Huppert, who contrasts with the rest of the characters of the film beautifully), is neatly sidelined as purely incidental, which is a shame as it is one of the few parts of the film that feels well executed.
Dead Man Down is, in summation, not a very enjoyable film. It’s well shot, in a dark ‘n gritty sort of way, and tries to take a somewhat intelligent approach to the crime drama. However, its convolution for the sake of convolution, as well as the untapped potential in the central characters make it a flaccid affair that is ultimately unfulfilling.
Score: 2/5
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