Gangster No. 1
 (2000)
review by Red Velvet Kitchen

'What's that?'

'That, is my favourite axe'

With a snarled mouth, hellhole eyes, the twitch of a severely unhinged Christopher Walken about him, and a demeanour which screams mortal pain as much as it does brutal authority, Paul Bettany is ferociously good as the unnamed gangster of the title. The film belongs to him, and he readily gobbles it up, before spitting it out and violently stamping it into oblivion. This is a fearsome performances, and I mean performance in the sense that his expression, his delivery, the way he walks, sneers and brawls is precisely what the film feels like, unsettling, violent and psychotic. This from the man who played the eccentric and very amusing 'Chaucer' in A Knight's Tale and the imaginary friend of Russell Crowe in 'A Beautiful Mind'. It's almost as if a best friend stopped singing 'Happy Birthday' inanely and thrust your head into the bright glow of the candles, before cutting off your tongue with a nearby knife. He really is startlingly good, epitomising the power-lusting themes of corruption, back-stabbing and brutality (both physical and otherwise) that interweave into director Paul McGuigan's hurtle through the crime underground of the 1960's. If Oscars were actually given out to actors with twenty-six teeth sunk firmly into such a repellent and beyond redemption character, rather than a big-name actress who manages to cry convincingly, Bettany should have a nice gold statuette to place next to the large machete and severed hand. I will repeat, this is a fantastic performance. It's a shame the film can't quite keep up with him.

Before you wonder why a crime flick is on a horror site, I'll explain. Gangster No. 1 is a horror film in a nifty East-End two-piece suit, just as Requiem For A Dream was horror with the facade of an addiction exploration. This focuses on the extremes, with close-ups and prying shots of grisliness abound, coupled with a stylistic excess. If horror is a product trying to frighten, repulse, shock and disturb, Gangster No. 1 certainly is your man.

At a boxing match, amidst gallons of putrid smoke, stale jokes and ageing criminals, one figure stands above the rest, the savage-looking Malcolm McDowell. He recalls that his former boss, the pretty boy granddaddy of the criminal world Freddie Mays (Thewlis) is being released from a long prison sentence this week, and reminisces about his time ascending the ranks from hired thug to Gangster Number One. The flashback setting is the swinging sixties in London, and the younger version of the unnamed gangster (Bettany) is hired as part of Mays' team, currently in tatters amidst volatile gang warfare. Distracted by this turmoil, Mays is oblivious to the fact that the young gangster is working his way up through the ranks through any means possible, unsatisfied until he's at the top, looking down. Admirably, the criminal underground is not portrayed as a comical fraternity of loveable rogues, Gangster No. 1's participants are as dirty and disgraceful as the blood-stained murk that swamps the film. Its very much grounded in the dishonesty, decadence and utterly ridiculous 'glamour' side of stealing and killing as a lifestyle.

I understand that like the equally creative but entirely different Sexy Beast, Gangster No. 1 has had something of a revival in the US, after not too many people bothered to go and see it in the merry old UK when it was released two years ago. Whilst this could just be misleading press attempts to hype a winning British film beyond its actual achievements, it does speak volumes about the state of this country's film industry, one content (almost obliged) to make nothing but twee comedies and period dramas. When a film like Sexy Beast, The Low Down, Some Voices, Late Night Shopping and so forth, tries to break the mould, its let down by a mixture of shaky distribution and audience apathy. Gangster No. 1 falls into this trap by abandoning the 'Cor Blimey You Wanker' school of Brit gangster vehicles in favour of something darker, more honest about its immorality and infinitely more meaningful. In fact, there's been a current crop of recent masculine crime films that have simple ostensible aims that mutate when you least expect it: The cat and mouse theatrics of Takashi Miike's 'Dead or Alive' turning into a ideological mudfight with supernatural undertones, Chris McQuarrie's heist-gone-wrong gradually turning into quite a profound study of two men and a world lost somewhere along the way, Summer of Sam's awesome skewering of serial killer hysteria with a political insight into a fascinating time in modern history. Gangster No. 1 can join these ranks, rambling on in an unspectacular fashion for an hour before suddenly exploding into a borderline surrealistic examination of evil and the corruption of power. This is fantastically realised in a shocking set-piece set to some hugely ironic backing music. Bettany storms through the gruesomely lit compound of a rival gangster, bursting into the bosses luxurious room and disables the kingpin with a shot to the leg. Whilst spouting some eerily memorable dialogue stony-faced, the young man disrobes as his victim and audience slowly realise things are going to get messy. The next five or six minutes are all shot from the perspective of the crime boss as he is thumped, cut, shot, glassed, kicked, throttled and tortured, in a scene which expertly summarises just how extremist this culture is, in every sense of the word. It's both disturbing, incredibly violent and strangely poignant.

Inevitably, when Bettany is not raising Hell, Hades and Purgatory, the film suffers from the miscast Thewlis who struggles to find the perfect pitch between thug and gentleman, humanity and ugliness, and many of the other underdeveloped roles which feel like foil for the protagonist's warpath. The world McGuigan portrays is ugly, but I never felt affected by the literal and figurative filth, the director failing to make his world as voyeuristic and nastily-intense as it could and should have been. The narrative is conceptually intriguing but fails in leaving the audience feeling anything other than disgust for what's on show, when I feel McGuigan was aiming for something a little more profound, a tragedy in the vein of King Lear or Macbeth, watching the gruesome fall of the once mighty.

Worth the watch for Bettany, and its pleasing to see a director who isn't enamoured with the falsely optimistic cartoon crime approach, but there are only glimpses of how emphatic this film could be, and those glimpses are grounded by too many workmanlike passages.

The DVD is a meagre affair, with interviews which provide some interesting opinions and insight from in particular, Thewlis and McDowell. Paul Bettany comes across as quite a nice lad after all, undercutting his monstrous performance somewhat, but conversely proving just what a great actor he could turn into with the right roles. The 'Making Off' is brief and curt and the trailers offered are marvellously threatening, if not a little misleading. One feature this lacks is the intriguing 'audio description for the visually impaired', a perk which you can normally find on 'Filmfour' DVD's. This is basically an audio track that describes exactly what is happening on screen, and is thus good if you're either deaf or merely curious. Unfortunately, I would've been interested in how they chose to explain a particular torture sequence, but no cigar.