Bronson (2008)

	Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn	COUNTRY United Kingdom GENRE Action/Biography/Crime NORWEGIAN TITLE Bronson RUNNING TIME 92 minutes
	Produced by: Daniel Hansford Rupert Preston
	Written by: Brock Norman Brock Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Charles Bronson	Tom Hardy
Paul	Matt King

Review

The always hard-hitting Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) has turned to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for inspiration in bringing Britain's most notorious prisoner, Michael Peterson (aka Charles Bronson), to the big screen. It's a flamboyant, uncaring and self-justificatory piece with obvious art-house inclinations. Whether Winding Refn chose this approach for lack of trustworthy material about Peterson's psychology and mental life is not for me to say, but it gives the film a stylistic and cinematic peculiarity (which may or may not work for you), as well as a thematic looseness that may evoke interest, but that also threatens to reduce the film's relevance. The acting is very good, with Tom Hardy giving a massively powerful performance in the lead, but despite Bronson's artistic qualities, it suffers from a self-indulgence that works as a wet blanket on this otherwise explosive material.

Copyright © 08.03.2010 Fredrik Gunerius Fevang

[BACK TO INDEX]

[HAVE YOUR SAY]