Film review; Lawless (18)

YOU CAN’T complain about being misled by a movie’s pulpy intentions when it’s called Lawless and makes a point of going postal pretty much from the get-go.

Set in the Prohibition era, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s family history, The Wettest County In The World, centres on three brothers who run a general store and an illegal booze business.

Their home is Franklin County, a backwater where a man can survive a slit throat by holding together his skin and arteries with his hands, which means we are also in a state of western myth, set to a joyfully anachronistic soundtrack that includes a hillbilly cover of Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat.

The leader of the Bondurant brothers is Forrest (Tom Hardy), who is built like a wall and is just as unyielding. He’s also a bit of a cornfield philosopher. “It is not the violence that sets men apart,” says ­Hardy in what may be the longest sentence in his script. “It is the distance that he is prepared to go.” And Forrest is prepared to go all the way, as demonstrated in a mercifully behind-closed-doors castration.

Middle brother Howard (Jason Clarke) is the muscle in the outfit, while the twerpy brother you’d vote most likely to go off-message is Jack. No-one ­really cares about Jack, yet ­inexplicably he gets to narrate the story and is the focus of the film. This means Shia LaBeouf is ideally cast, since he’s an actor so annoying that you root for the robots in Transformers to unite in giving him a sound pummelling – and yet he’s ­everywhere in American movies. In Lawless, he’s probably playing the modern emerging American man, with his love of flashy consumables, but really I would much rather watch Hardy grunting at all-comers in Grandpa Walton’s cast-offs.

They are not good guys, but they do make good hooch, and legend has it that they are indestructible, with little to fear until slimy Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce) rolls into town demanding that all the bootleggers start paying a slice of their moonshine profits to him, or he will have them destroyed. Of course, this means war, with the brothers finding an unexpected ally in regional kingpin Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman, seriously under-used), who admires both their moonshine and their moxie.

Lawless is scripted by gothstar Nick Cave and directed by Hillcoat, who previously collaborated on The Proposition, which shares much of Lawless’s DNA including an unsparing country setting and buckets of bloodshed. Yet despite tar-and-feathering, stabbings, shootouts and rape, Lawless is actually slightly less brutal than The Proposition. Both also ­focus on brotherly loyalty, and bent law enforcers – here Pearce has a grand time as the finicky rotten copper who only flinches at blood if it spatters his immaculate menswear.

What about the women of Franklin county? Well, one is a former showgirl (Jessica Chastain) who moved to the sticks to escape modern city beastliness and fancies Forrest so badly that she might as well put a “please park here” sticker on her behind. The other significant female is a rebellious preacher’s daughter (Mia Wasikowska). You don’t think these two women sound as ­interesting and developed as the boys? Well, this is a western, missy, so git.

If you treat Lawless as an eccentric – and beautifully shot – piece of moonshine, chances are you won’t be disappointed. This is a high-proof product, and some of its performances are intoxicating. But the plotting is also rougher than a jar of sourmash.

Rating: * * * *

On general release from Friday