Brilliant and touching

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Why does the bad guy kill our two heroes in the first place? Why does the good guy go to all the trouble to successfully find the bad guy only to forget the drugs? A bit of a giveaway that. Why does good guy not ask cop, "How did he die?" When the cop says ".. your brother is dead"? If he'd fallen in the river drunk, then he wouldn't have to bother with the whole retribution thing! Why does Mr Bigshot bad guy live in a crappy rat house slum? Why does the good guy lure the bad guy to the club and not kill him in the car park? Could've saved a life! Oh, and do you really need a telescopic sight to shoot a guy in a club or from a few places away? Great acting, great cast. Just that these little things niggle. Watch it. Good movie.

It only has the fault of having done it in a large part in the general plane and thus losing a large part of the force. But it's one of the best character presentations I've seen in a long time. In a few seconds, accurate, fast, accurate. All presented of this character. Casey is well presented but not so much and the worst is Bale. He needs a lot of time to introduce him. Too many sequences and too many planes.One of the things I do not like about this movie is that it has about thirty minutes of film left over. Why do I say it? From the presentation of Woody until it comes back out, if I remember correctly, spend almost fifty minutes. He is telling us other things that I think we are not interested in, or half repeating. It is not necessary to see so much of Casey that it is repeated, it is not necessary to see so much of Bale that we are not interested. Or he decides to tell the story of the brothers and Woody or decides to tell the stories of the brothers, but the two can not be told. You do not really know which one is telling you. Once Harrelson comes out again, that's all, this story, then he really was interested in this story and not the other.The actors are all splendid, everyone has their brilliant moments. They are all consecrated actors making a film without a budget and leaving their skin behind.Apart there are faults that I see that I do not believe, I explain them in the spoiler zone.Photography, I understand that in America, fortunately, independent film works and that there are such films, never have a photograph, then when they have shown they are good, they have a budget and they have photography, but of course for the film, photography, He supports with nothing. Does not exist.The direction, the problem for my taste, is that it pretends to explain too much about the characters and it is repeated and lost and the story is gone. He does not know how to make beautiful shots or to have the camera. In fact, there are times when the camera passes without a foreground to general and foreground, with what I get out of the narrative.No instant movie is a movie that is worth watching. Just to see the three of them and see a movie with a background, not just shots and revenge.Spoiler: I can not imagine an American policeman at the end of the movie acting like that, and least of all that character. And the truth is that I was watching the movie and I do not believe that as we know the characters of Bale and Woody, that the story continues as follows. I was watching the movie and I thought how was going to lose Woody used to that life he leads.

This could have been shortened up into a movie with more punch, but seems to lope along nicely. Christian Bale and Casey Affleck are brothers, Bale has a man's-man job at a miniscule steel works company that seems to be put together with ticky-tacky and functioning at a scale so small one can only believe it turns out the metal fixin's for matchbox cars and toy pianos. Casey is a sometime military dude who re-ups or is re-upped to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. He tries to make money by doing anything like standing around waiting for the right numbers to drop. Or fist fighting. The story hangs together barely. Casey's character fights in what are for him fixed fights and he usually takes the dive. But although he does this more than once, he really hates to take dives. And yet his handler, a battered looking Willem Dafoe keeps using him, including in a fight co-managed by a convincingly dangerous looking Woody Harrelson. It is hard to believe that real people behave so stupidly that you want to shout at the screen, but in fact people do behave pretty stupid, so it is believable in real life, only this isn't real life this is a movie which has to be believable. I got the impression that this movie was a precursor to Manchester by the Sea which it preceded in release by 3 years, but the Casey Affleck character is the same character, a skinny man's man with major interior issues which cause him to experience major depression yet express himself violently. His movements, and that of older brother Christian Bale are played out in this long, predictable revenge story. Other characters were played by the comely Zoe Saldana and the grim, somewhat blocky appearance of Forest Whittaker. Good to see, but not really pivotal to the plot, such as it was. I don't know if the town of Braddock is real or what State it is in, but I enjoyed the industrial ruin of a small town atmospherics. Reminiscent of places I'm from that haunt me. The music was unremarkable. The story played out predictably right to the end.

I have not seeing such a waste of good actors in a while. This movie has a wonderful cast, including: Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, and Sam Shepard. I find it a little puzzling how these actors agreed to help tell this story. This is just another revenge story. Not even original at it (like "Hard candy"). Just the typical poor, unlucky, but still unbelievably good guy trying to get by. The which does not bring anything new and is so damn predictable. The movie aims to fall in the action/drama realm, and it has its moments in both, but it fails hardly in the action part. And the rhythm is too damn slow. Direction and editing did not help... To wrap up, it has good acting but but direction and editing, so the final result is a sucky, boring movie.