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Malcolm
McDowell is the ageing psychopath looking back on his exploits
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Not
so much a ganster fable as it is an exercise in style and attitude,
Paul McGuigan's Gangster No.1 is the kind of stereotypically
brutal and crazy British gangster film that comes from the tradition
of The Krays and The Long Good Friday, both better
movies.
Gangster
No.1 is replete with style, half of which is great camera and
editing, the other half is with the era of the 60s that heralded
the rise of the gangster picture in Britain. While this is no Get
Carter, it does ooze with the same cool Italian suits, Bentley
cars and tough dialogue that seems to amuse other directors such
as Steven Soderbergh, who made an homage to the British gangster
with The Limey, which featured a transplanted cockney gangster
on a saga of vengeance in California. Gangster No.1 features
just such an icon, this time as the title character played by the
ever-sneering Malcolm McDowell.
McDowell
is in two bookend sequences as an ageing mobster who is sparked
to remember his infamous rise to the top when he receives news that
his old mentor is returning from prison after 30 years. We know
immediately by his reaction that he had something to do with his
former employer's circumstances.
The
majority of the film charts the rise of McDowell's younger self,
played by the reptilian Paul Bettany, a blonde psychopath with an
intense glare and a stirring ambition. Bettany begins his bloody
path to the top when he's recruited by an older criminal of a higher
class, played by David Thewlis. The younger gangster is immediately
taken with his mentor's style, his clothes, grand apartment and
his women. From that point we know that the younger version will
stop at nothing to overcome his senior.
Inventive
way to show butchery
The
problem is not with the cliche, it's with the utter indefatigability
of the character. All we know of the character is his ambition and
his depravity. It's not clear if McGuigan wanted to impart anything
more than the sheer psychosis of the gangster in his tireless quest
to bite away at Thewlis' empire. Along
the way, the young gangster drops cars on people, stabs, hammers,
shocks, and otherwise brutalizes everyone in his way. I have no
trouble usually with unsympathetic character studies, but here is
the most shallow of portraits that renders the film irredeemable
but for its loads of style.
One
scene really defines the highs and lows of Gangster No.1. In
a scene that ranks up there with some of the most depraved scenes
ever filmed, the gangster is shown torturing a rival from the
point of view of the victim as the victim swims in and out of
consciousness, waking up only to see the gangster plunging a chisel
again and again into the camera, revelling in the sprays of scarlet
red. As the gangster butchers his victim, he leans close and mutters
incomprehensible craziness. I tried to find some grounding in what
he said but even in the clearer soliloquies performed by the older
gangster, McDowell, there wasn't much to understand. I could only
come out of that scene admiring the inventiveness of the direction,
but deploring the vast abyss of the characterization.
In
better films such as The Krays, Sexy Beast and even
Let Him Have It, we have not so much a sympathetic background
of gangsters, we at least have a background upon which we can stake
some sort of understanding. Coming out of Gangster No.1 is
a portrait where the single paint is red.
On
DVD.
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