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83For all Dead Man's Shoes' well-paced, well-observed boondocks melodrama, its premise seems simultaneously slender and overheated.
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80An original, complex, and utterly gruesome revenge parable, and never portrays its characters as black and white. Considine handles his performance like a pro, and only adds to the pure skill behind it.
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75This is no simplistic vigilante movie. Like Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance" trilogy, it explores the nature of the beast of revenge, leaving the audience in a sweat of dread.
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The always fantastic Paddy Considine evokes both sensitivity and explosiveness.
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67Meadows loses control as he goes along, veering into assorted noodling and sacrificing the knife's-edge clarity of the early going for something arty and artificial.
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63Very slowly builds to a powerful climax for this arty cross between "Straw Dogs" and "First Blood."
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63Though the story is formulaic, the bleakly naturalistic performances give it an uncomfortable sting.
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50The imagery is exotically grungy and jumbled by flashback, but in the end, the picture's more pulp than juice.
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40The film is filled with deeply unpleasant and stupid people whose vapid speech is largely incomprehensible due to thick regional accents.
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Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.
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40Film plays as a quirky Brit riff on everything from U.S. slasher pics to revenge oaters but without Meadows' usual psychological complexity.
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30Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.
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30A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.
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There are flashes of grim humor interspersed with the murders, but not enough wit to elevate this movie beyond its primary identity: grisly revenge fantasy.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 10
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Mixed: 1 out of 10
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Negative: 1 out of 10
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RichR.10
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NeilF.10I'm sorry but 52% is shocking. This is one of the finest, most realistic gritty depictions of modern Brittish culture.
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Rose9