Dead Man Down Rating 3 (out of five)
Starring: Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Dominic Cooper, Terrence Howard
Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev
Running time: 110 minutes
Parental guidance: Violence, coarse language
Playing at: Banque Scotia, Colossus, Kirkland, Lacordaire, March? Central, Sph?retech,
Taschereau cinemas
There's a distinctly European feel to Dead Man Down, a thriller directed by Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev, starring Irish-born Colin Farrell and Swedish-Spanish ing?nue Noomi Rapace, and set in a New York City that feels cut off from its natural native texture of street life, glamour and comical cabbies.
It's a story about two lost people seeking revenge in different, violent ways and struggling through the gloom of life's disappointments. If you didn't know better, you'd swear the whole thing was translated from the Swedish; in fact, some of the dialogue is in French with English subtitles.
The movie reunites Oplev and Rapace from the original film version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and they bring with it some of the same Nordic chill, and some of the same sense of hopeless fate.
Rapace plays Beatrice, a pretty beautician who's not so pretty any more since a car accident scarred the left side of her face. The neighbourhood kids call her "monster." Rebecca lives with her mother (French star Isabelle Huppert).
Beatrice et m?re live in an apartment with a view of their neighbour, Victor (Farrell), a taciturn tough guy who works for a mobster named Alphonse Hoyt (Terrence Howard.) Hoyt is involved in the drug trade, although the film's at-tempts at evoking the hip-hop culture of guns, cocaine and danger look like something copied from TV.
Someone is knocking off Alphonse's gang members and leaving cryptic notes ("719. Now you realize") and little squares from a photograph that Alphonse is slowly assembling like a jigsaw puzzle.
A mystery man is out to get him, and when Beatrice notices that her cute, across-the-courtyard neighbour recently strangled someone to death, we get a good idea who. Having a murderous neighbour, which was such a burden in Rear Window, is a blessing to Beatrice, who is looking for someone who can do a little assassination job: to knock off the drunk driver who caused the car accident that disfigured her.
This throws Beatrice and Victor into an unhappy partnership, although one with enough affection that she gives him her lucky rabbit's foot ("it's chartreuse," she instructs him.)
He's on a mission of vengeance himself, something to do with his late wife and daughter and a background as a Hungarian engineer with military training. Imagine if Keyser Soze had emigrated from The Usual Suspects into something by the Hughes Brothers during their Stockholm period.
Farrell and Rapace are well suited, two quiet performers who hint at hidden depths. As they go on their separate although connected missions, the person on their trail is a more expressive choice: Darcy (Dominic Cooper), another one of Alphonse's gang who fancies himself a bit of a detective. Good thing, too, because there's no police presence in Dead Man Down.
The screenplay by W.H. Wyman is as elusive as everything else, filling in the story as it goes and counting on us to keep up. At one stage, Rebecca delivers her mother's cookies to Victor, opens the refrigerator door and says: "I will wedge it in there between the mustard and these plastic explosives." That's the foreshadowing for a final reel that throws off its cool European angst and embraces the unlikely pyrotechnics of Hollywood: gun battles, mass killings, everything blowing up real fine.
It doesn't seem very European, but as Jean-Luc Godard once said, all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. A chartreuse rabbit's foot is optional.
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