After crafting a delicate and passionate love story in
2011’s Perfect Sense, it seems only
fitting for director David Mackenzie to take the exact opposite route with his
new film Starred Up, an intense crime
drama starring Jack O’Connell (300: Rise of an Empire) and Ben
Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises) as
a father-son pair shut away in the same prison and the problems faced by both
as the son attempts to assert his dominance and make a name for himself amongst
the inmates.
Starred Up is one
of those British films that, on the outside (at least from the trailer) seems
to be about a group of geezer/hard-man stereotypes and attempts to make them
interesting. But unlike the futile efforts of Guy Ritchie, whose ideas became
horribly repetitive and ran out of steam halfway through Snatch, Starred Up
manages to both create and retain audience interest in the characters and
doesn’t out-stay it’s welcome, clocking in at a mere 106 minutes (though if it
had been longer, I wouldn’t have complained).
A great reason for the film’s success is that it manages to
make a fraught and almost non-existent relationship between a father and son
endearing and even heart-breaking. Jack O’Connell is fantastic, redeeming
himself in full for his rather dull performance in the new 300, alternating seamlessly between stone-cold, calculated detachment
and raging, adrenaline-fuelled outbursts. Ben Mendelsohn is one of the best
things in the film, his foul-mouthed, gravel-voiced exterior a perfectly
executed evolution of his mumbling drunk in 2012’s Killing Them Softly. The scenes where the two are alone or standing
up to the prison guards are orchestrated well with intimate cinematography and
a complete lack of music, leaving their relationship laid bare before the
camera.
Something else that also contributes to the raw, intense
atmosphere is the film’s refusal to shy away from things that other mainstream
dramas wouldn’t dare, including brutal levels of language, violence,
prison-born homosexuality, racism and entirely non-glamorous displays of male
nudity. You really do feel every punch, wince at the relentless racial slurs
and find your eyebrows disappearing into your hairline at the constant
swearing. There are also many genuine laugh-out-loud moments; one gag in
particular kept raising laughs from the audience for almost two whole minutes,
in fact I’d argue that there are more laughs in the film than in most comedies.
The overall effect of these is that they lull you into forgetting that many of
the characters you’re laughing about wouldn’t hesitate to beat each other to a
pulp in a matter of seconds, and when the darker moments (and there are many)
suddenly rear their heads, it creates an atmosphere of genuine shock.
So whilst I feel that it could benefit from a slightly
longer running time to fully realise the moments of real darkness, because the
pieces that are most shocking are too short, Starred Up is a brilliantly brutal and intense drama with a
well-crafted father-son relationship at the centre that will leave you reeling.
4 Stars
4 Stars
