Their crime is our punishment - Film - Arts - Evening Standard
       

Their crime is our punishment

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This violent and retrograde thriller from Nick Love proves he is a good film-maker with a strangely twisted mindset.

It has Sean Bean as a paratrooper returning from Iraq who finds the lawlessness on the streets of London compounded by corrupt police, gangsters going free and paedophiles lingering around every school.

So he assembles a group of like-minded men, including a black lawyer (Lennie James) whose pregnant wife has been killed to stop him prosecuting a Mr Big. They will enforce justice with a brutality that mirrors that of the criminals.

The film, which suggests that London is completely out of control and seems to ask us to take the law into our own hands, is dangerously reactionary and not even very logical, suggesting that the Iraq war is largely to blame for social breakdown.

All its technical efficiency and the able acting of a decent cast can't make up for the pretty nasty taste it leaves in the mouth.

Outlaw
Cert: 18

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