Villain has Fairbrass as Eddie Franks, a criminal who's released from prison after ten years, and is looking to get his life on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, if it were that simple, we wouldn't have a movie. To start, his brother Sean, who was supposed to be running their pub when he was away, has a coke habit and is now into some mobsters for a huge debt. At the same time, his estranged daughter wants nothing to do with him, and while he's repairing that relationship so he could be a part of her and his grandson's life, he finds out she's in an abusive relationship. Now to fix both situations, it looks like Franks will have to turn to crime one last time before he can finally put it all behind him and move forward. This shouldn't be a problem for someone as experienced as Eddie, right?
This was really good. I was hesitant to give it the "action" tag, because it doesn't have a lot of action; as was I hesitant to give it the "suspense" tag, because, while it has some suspense, it's not really a suspense move per se. Drama might be the best genre, but we don't have a drama tag, so I had to make the best that I could with it. And as you can tell from the cover, this was hard to market as well, because it's not really anything like you're seeing there. What we get is a solid story about a tragic figure surrounded by other tragic figures. It's more a character study than a classic English hardman flick, but what makes it so great is how much Fairbrass is up to the task. The supporting cast all turn in great performances as well, working well as satellites around Fairbrass's central figure, yet making their characters compelling in the process. It's more Indie art house flick than DTV actioner, and while it's packaged like the latter, don't let the fact that it's the former scare you away from it.
Before I move forward, just a word of warning that in the later paragraphs I will need to give away the ending, so if you want to watch this first, by all means do, then come back and see what I thought about the rest. You can find this on Prime and Pluto here in the States.
The fact that Fairbrass was able to pivot this character away from the standard British hardman role is ultimately what makes it work so well. I think that's because he's a true actor that just happens to also be very imposing in stature, not a former athlete or something like that turned actor due to his imposing stature. The other thing he does here is he leans into his age, almost playing someone even older. When he holds his grandson, he makes himself appear very grandfatherly. Look at the image of him below. That's not Pat Tate Hoovering up lines of coke and beating up stuntmen with a baseball bat, that's a man in his late 50s looking at his infant grandson and trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see him playing Pat Tate or another standard hardman, but to see him pull this off as well as he does was fantastic, and really entertaining.
Spoiler alert, a final warning that I'm going to have to give away the ending here, so if you don't want to know what happens, don't read further and go watch the film.
This movie ends with Eddie Franks dying, but in way that you wouldn't expect. As things are unraveling around him, it's actually his daughter's abusive boyfriend who shows up on a motorbike and hoses him down with Uzi fire. For some in the IMDb comments, this was a letdown, which I get. But there was also the sense of the European tragic tradition that this is playing on, something that's more common in the UK than here in the States. Will and I discussed it a bit, and I mentioned how Mark Twain flips that tradition in Tom Sawyer, where Tom gets to attend his own funeral, instead of the hero being destroyed by his own hubris, he gets to see himself celebrated as the center of attention. Will had a good counter to that though, when he mentioned the gangster films of the 30s with stars like Cagney and Robinson, where those characters always died tragically at the end--and that tradition continues with a film like Scarface, or even Goodfellas where Henry Hill symbolically dies when he's forced to live a mundane life in witness protection. Why then is an ending like this so anathema to us Americans, where it fits better for Brits or Europeans? We want to see an Eddie Franks vanquish his enemies and avoid capture from the police, right? But maybe that's a more recent thing, the idea of the "anti-hero," Fast and Furious or Marvel movies where baddies come back to join the heroes, there is no dying by the sword that the main character lives by, only living. So to see an anti-hero like Eddie Franks not only die, but die the way he does, works so counter to that new tradition that it ruins the film for a lot of people. For me though, I appreciated it here.
The other piece I really liked was how we get the sense that Franks has it all figured out, only to find out he was wrong, and that mistake was what becomes his undoing. It's another piece that we often don't see in newer films, especially ones made here in the US. The hero almost always has it all figured out, even when it seems like he doesn't, we find out after the fact that he knew all along. Not only does this not go in that direction, but it warns us that that might be the case earlier on. Essentially, what happens is, Eddie's brother Sean isn't into the baddies for a large sum of money because, as Eddie initially thought, the baddies stole their own goods that he was supposed to transport, a classic scam baddies use to extort their couriers; but rather because the police confiscated it. The baddies warn Eddie that his brother is a "grasser," UK-speak for the US "rat," but he refuses to believe it. It's part of the hubris that leads to our hero's tragic end, but it's the kind of move many modern US films won't go for, which is too bad.
Finally, during the episode, I asked Will if anyone ever played baseball in the UK, or if baseball bats were just used in bar fights and gang fights like we see in these UK crime films, and he confirmed that it's the second thing. Here I believe Fairbrass uses a hammer to attack some guys giving him a hard time in his pub, which makes more sense, because hammers still have utilitarian uses outside of attacking people with them; but the baseball bat, if no one is playing baseball, has only one other purpose. And to be fair, it serves that purpose really well. The baseball bat has been engineered for more than a century to be able to do something as good as possible that the best players only do about 30% of the time, and that's hit a baseball being thrown at 90+ MPH, that's curving and moving around as it approaches the batter. That makes a stationary human head an easy target for that uniquely designed baseball bat, and while the UK doesn't have a great need for a bat to hit a moving fastball, there are plenty of human heads, especially in London. The question then is, where does one get a baseball bat in the UK? At a sporting goods store? Or a bar supply store? And while we also use a baseball bat as a weapon here in the US, when an assault rifle is so easy to come by, why not spend the extra money? If we did things like they do in the UK, the man rampaging through a school with just a baseball bat may hurt some kids, but someone might be able to disarm him, and you also assume the local police wouldn't be afraid to engage him either like they are when he's stalking the school halls with an assault rifle.
And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime and Pluto here in the States. I think it's well worth it. This may not fit the usual genres we cover here, and the ending may not be what you're looking for, but something that's well-shot and well-acted is all you need to get you to the church on time. And if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode I did with Will on Craig Fairbrass. It's episode 130, from July 25th in the archives--and warning, in that episode I go off on a long tangent comparing North Jersey in the US, to Essex in England.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9820352
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