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DEAD MAN'S SHOES
Directed by: Shane Meadows.
Produced by: Mark Herbert.
Written by: Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows & Paul Fraser.
Director of Photography: Danny Cohen.
Edited by: Chris Wyatt, Lucas Roche & Celia Haining.
Released by: Magnolia.
Country of Origin: UK. 86 min. Not Rated.
With: Paddy Considine, Toby Kebbell, Gary Stretch, Stuart Wolfenden, Neil Bell & Paul Sadot.

Richard (Paddy Considine) returns with his younger brother to their Midlands hometown after leaving eight years earlier. Through flashbacks, it’s gradually revealed that they had left because Richard’s brother, Anthony (Toby Kebbell), had been assaulted by smalltime suburban drug lords. A slow, “spastic mental case,” Anthony only wanted to be liked and didn’t understand what was happening when the dealers offered him drugs. Engorged on substances, he was humiliated, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Richard, who was serving in the Army at the time, now seeks justice. But while fighting the good fight, sometimes being a hero means becoming a serial killer.

Writer/director Shane Meadows (Twentyfourseven) tries to set a morally ambiguous tone with the film’s untidy ending, but it appears that even he knew there wasn’t enough ethical tension in having a man murder the local drug dealers who destroyed his brother. Perhaps that is why piecemeal flashbacks occur before each killing, as if to justify Richard’s actions with as much incrimination as Meadows could muster. (They made Anthony drink alcohol! He was mentally disabled! They gave him pot! Ecstasy! Acid! A man propositioned him for sex!) It doesn’t help that each person realizes he deserves to die right before Richard kills him – the thugs are just that horrible and Richard is apparently just that persuasive. Meadows lobbies hard to bait his audience with the ambiguous morals of a loving brother and a group of people whose careless drug use results in violence, but he forces his hand too much for it to work; drugs are evil, dealers are bad, and Richard is crazy, that’s as complicated as it gets.

On top of all that, Richard is made out to be an unstoppable killer. This is later explained by the mentioning of his Army service, but boot camp doesn’t manufacture omniscient and omnipresent supermen. That said, Meadows does create terrifying moments, his jarring directorial style helping Dead Man’s Shoes to work as a thriller/horror film. And as in Twentyfourseven, actors freely interact. The improvised dialogue clicks and pops.

But it’s the one-sided plot that makes the film difficult to swallow. It could just as easily have been about a ruined and out-of-control man returning from the military who decides to take matters into his own hands (ironically, Meadows even cites in the press notes First Blood, which shares that exact plot, as an inspiration). But no, Shoes is about drugs. And like any PSA, it’s hardly ambiguous in its condemnation. Zachary Jones
May 10, 2006