Hard Men

You get the impression from the other reviews on this page that this is one of those films you love or hate.

Well there has to be someone to spoil it, so I'll put my two pennies worth in. I like the film even though it has many flaws. The three main actors are very watchable and the film passes real quick which is a sign of a well paced effort.

Sure it borrows moments from many other films but then again which film of the last 40 years hasn't?

Cliched, violent and derivative it may be, but I still stayed with it to the end, and it does have a lot of style.

Get Carter it may not be, but a damn fine effort never-the-less.

Back in the Fifties, many a movie seemed to require one or other of its characters to say: 'hey, let's put on a show!'. In what may have passed for the gestation of this film, someone, perhaps the writer / director, said: 'Hey, let's make a movie!' The result now is much the same as the result way back then, except that in those Fifties disasters the people on each side of the camera had a reasonable idea of what they were doing. No such luck here: if I'd had to sit through this as a graduation piece from young film makers, the most charitable verdict would've been that 'Hard Men' is to movie making what Jeffrey Archer is to English Literature. In other words, no connection.

The movie doesn't so much take to the screen as set up house in a cliche -- guns, shouting, more guns, more shouting, bad language, guns, bad language, guns. As reportage it's dismal. As fiction it's unsustainable. The acting is of a standard to make one wish to hand out Oscars to those responsible for 'Night of the Lepus' ('Attack of The Killer Rabbits') and the direction as consistent as a weathervane in a hurricane.

But that ol' Fifties magic lingers on, for a third of the way through the director finally loses the plot altogether and it's time for 'hey, let's put on a show!' -- whereupon one or other of the mass murderers turns to the camera and sings about his newborn baby.

Come back, Ed Wood. All is forgiven.

Rating: unrateable.

A firecracker of a film, except that it was exposed to dampness for too long and fails to ignite. The premise is appealing enough: a 3-man gang of East London thugs do the business for the guvnor, one "sees the light" and wants out, the others get the order to eradicate him for whatever reasons. Tension, action, exploration of a conscience-troubled character would all seem to be laid out against the backbone of the plot to make for riveting viewing. However, what we get is a clumsy, crude, badly reworked mish-mash of other films, mainly plagiarising the Quentin chap. The jokes are frankly not funny and the dialogue so depressingly unimaginative. Bad language may add to authenticity, but (unless you write like Roddy Doyle) is not the key to belly laughs. "Hard Men" wavers between wanting to be uncompromising in its violence and wanting to please all by brightening things with colourful characters. Violent it certainly is, but the attempts at humour derail the carriage, leaving the viewer with a feeling of disappointment at what could have been, given tighter scripting, better actors, an engaging score and greater focus. "Lock, Stock ..." is a long way ahead of this in all stakes.

"Hard men" never really made it and it's one of the greatest crimes in cinema as this movie made by Amalou (he only made 3 movies since now) is one of the rare pearls in today's British cinema. The violence of course refers to Tarantino, but so what?, hundreds of other movies did and it's absolutely funny. We follow the adventures of three maffiosi (their boss is the legendary Mad Frankie Fraser, played by himself) who earn "their" money. They do have their own techniques and as you can guess it's not exactly the most customer-friendly one. But once you're in the mob, there's no escape and one day one of the three becomes a father and want to become a family man he already wrote his testament. "Hard men" is a typical British movie that only will be understand by those who hate Mel Gibson-movies (the dialogue about whether Abba are good or not, is hilarious. Superb and one of the greatest I saw, plus tons better than overrated Tarantino-copies.

Tone, Bear and John are three hard men in the employee of London underworld boss Pops Den. They are collectors of money, threateners of people and removers of competition. However, with the birth of his first child, Tone decides that he has had enough and that he needs to turn his life around, starting with getting out of the life. When Bear tells Pops this, he orders them to kill Tone and bring him his severed hand by nine o'clock the next morning.

It is to be expected that, when one genre suddenly spawns a bit film, that many others will jump on the bandwagon - some being good and some being rubbish. We saw it with Scream when it relaunched the teen horror genre and spawned a tonne of copies. So it was no surprise to anyone (even if it was still depressing) that the success of a few British cockney gangster films with dark comedy spawned a raft of copies - most of which were average at best and ended up flopping.

Hard Men is one of these films and it deserved every penny it failed to get at the box office. The plot is almost none existent and centres on one night in the lives of these three. It would better if the events in the lives of the characters had mattered or been engaging but, because they aren't, then the plot just falls to pieces (not that it was ever really together). Instead it seems to revel in the grim of it's characters - but doesn't have the decency to make them people. One scene sees a prostitute talk about her years of abuse, but even that is just a scene to add shock value rather than depth. The film even has the nerve to look back fondly to the days of `civilised' gangsters (giving a cameo to Frankie Fraser for that reason) as if all the violence on display here is in some way admirable or a curiosity.

The cast are roundly bad but it is not really their fault - they simply have no material to work with. The cameo for a violent criminal is just pure bad taste and adds nothing to the film. As director and writer Amalou seems to have just fluked his way into the job on the basis of seeing better films and ripping them off. Certainly he brings no wit or style to his script even if his direction is actually quite good considering the budget he had to work with.

Overall this is a very poor film that will only appeal to fans of the genre - all others need to avoid it. I was surprised by just how rough I found the whole thing was - it lacked originality, revelled in uninvolving and seemed under the impression that the word `f*ck' is the height of clever writing.