London Boulevard Movie Review …

After serving three years in prison, Mitchell (Colin Farrell) finds himself back amongst the last sort of people he should be around if he wants to stay out of prison again – and he desperately does. An old friend named Billy gives him the key to a house that has been ‘repossessed’ from a doctor and persuades him that he needs Mitchell as muscle to help him collect debts from tower blocks and Mitchell takes a job as a pseudo bodyguard for a reclusive young actress (Keira Knightly), but he’s painfully aware that he’s not staying as clear of crime as he’d like.

It’s only when he stops Billy from hitting a woman in the tower block but makes the mistake of hanging around and getting beaten up by her brothers that he comes to the attention of Gant (Ray Winstone). Gant is at the top of the chain of gangsters and wants Mitchell to be at the centre of his business, and he doesn’t take no for an answer.

When I first saw the trailer for London Boulevard, I was fully expecting to see Guy Ritchie’s name in the credits because the concept, characters and situation seem so familiar. William Monahan is a first time director with London Boulevard, but he also adapted Ken Bruen’s book of the same name into a screenplay and has quite a few big movie titles in his screenplay filmography.

London Boulevard starts out as if it will be a Ritchie film wannabe, with the same heavy music and London gangster culture as Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Rock ‘n Rolla, but it very quickly diverges from that course to be something else entirely. Monahan’s characters, for example, have a lot more to them than you expect.

Crime lord Gant looks one dimensional when you first see him strut onscreen in a smart suit with slick backed hair and a clichéd habit of telling a story before he kills someone, but his interest in Mitchell stems from sexual attraction as well as a greed for power and at times he mentions childhood abuse. With a man like Gant these things might all be lies, but he sits between several stereotypes at once that make him quite an interesting character who tries to make himself untouchable.

Mitchell himself remains stoic and quiet for over half of the movie (possibly because Colin Farrell has taken on a London accent for this role that he can’t quite manage), but whereas a lot of gangster films with quiet protagonists ask you to imagine hidden depths to their personalities, Farrell displays Mitchell’s without words. To begin with he’s desperately holding on to self made rules about what he should and shouldn’t do, but when pushed his focus narrows to one objective. This is a man who says that prison was “embarrassing” and stands up to Gant when others shake in his presence, but is unable to shoot the kid who killed a close friend of his when he has the chance.

Whereas Mitchell is unusually complex for a gangster film, Keira Knightly’s actress named Charlotte who is hiding from the paparazzi doesn’t come up to the same standard. I liked the way that she has become so removed that even basic manners like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ pass her by, but the fact that she and Mitchell will eventually fall in love and want to live happily ever after together seems to be so set in stone that the film doesn’t pay very much attention to the process. There’s a scene where they stay in the country together, but Mitchell spends more time with her live-in friend Jordan (David Thewlis) than he does Charlotte.

London Boulevard is a surprising movie, and one that deserves more praise than it gets. Unfortunately it suffers from having too much plot stuffed into too short a time, but despite being American, the director has captured London and the people who live there very accurately. The music is one of the best things about the film and there are a few truly iconic shots, but London Boulevard is essentially a good film that has been dragged down by borrowing too much from other gangster films. The gratuitous swearing, unnecessary racism and sudden violence are reminiscent of Guy Ritchie, and while the story is good, you know that if a movie starts a subplot at the beginning and then appears to forget about it, it’s bound to come back into play at the end to tidy things up.

London Boulevard is a decent film, but its brushes with greatness and the complexity of its characters are worth much more than the attempts at typical London gangster action that we’ve all seen before.

London Boulevard Movie Trailer

All of them depict the experiences Jews have, this is a different approach already, since out main character, 8 year old Bruno (played amazingly well by Asa Butterfield) is on the other side of the “barricade”. His father (David Thewlis) is a German officer, sent from their luxurious house in Berlin to some forgotten place, near an extermination camp.

His family finds out in few days about this shocking place, this leaving his wife (Vera Farmiga) almost oblivious of anything else. All she is trying now to do is protect her little explorer’s innocence, by hiding the true purpose of the “farm” next to their house.

Bruno is doing his exploring one day, when he gets near the electric fence that separates him from the “farmers”, as he calls them. Here he meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy who’s the same age as he is.

While his tutor, father and sister keep on telling him how bad the Jews are, Bruno is amazed to find out Shmuel is a nice kid, even if he’s got that weird name and is always hungry.

Bruno keeps his “exploring” secret, while his family is still keeping the entire horror under wraps. If Guido was able to save his kid with turning it all into a game, Bruno’s family, by keeping it all secret, didn’t allow the kid to realize the dangers from the camp, thus endangering his life.

John Boyne’s novel turns into a amazingly well done movie, I really recommend.