I'll add to the praise for this seemingly sterile portrait of a man who is rough around the edges but has conditioned himself to be such through a complicated relationship with his own social context, including familial ideologies, economic class, and forged an identity with goals that contrast with those of his conditioned upbringing. His emotional blunting only covers up his anger brewing at the contradictions between his nature and convoluted nurtures. If this sounds familiar that's because it is, but only in superficialities, for the devastated insides create a vacuum that removes the fat to show brutal honesty that is far less cinematically showy than dull as it is in real life.
This is a fierce film with abrasive performances, sharp editing, confrontational violations of personal space by the camera, and spacious narrative areas that are allowed to just exist in obscure impermanent energy, like his post-boxing tryst. Speaking of, despite all his manipulations for selfish gain throughout the film, this extended rendezvous breathes so well, with Williamson taking the role of compassionate active listener who also happens to be interested in meeting his needs, that I actually felt aligned with him completely in his vulnerable side. In a film with no detectable flaws this was the most surprising and welcome detour.
The film's greatest strength is that it humanizes the people we box away as nasty without making any melodramatic didactic plea for us to give him rope and offer forgiveness, or even pause for any length of time in empathy. He can be sympathetic without earning a change in stance; and that’s far more realistic and honest than most films would, or could, bring themselves to do. It’s the simplest way to draw a complex figure and I loved it. Since everyone is making comparisons to
Get Carter I’ll just say that I went into this expecting something far less compelling or intense, and came away loving it so much more, in part because Nicol Williamson is a much more interesting character than Caine’s, a man unraveling externally who was already undone long before any trigger emerged, contained beneath a facade of steady temperament that is actually apathy as a defense against the world and himself, just like so many out there. The self-destructive finish only doubles down on the struggle he endures to prove to himself that his ego is worth a damn. A high bar to self-impose, to put it mildly, and one he faces daily.
The moment where Nicol stops after cornering the kid who he blames for his father’s death, sober to what he’s doing and removed from his emotional response, is striking. He looks genuinely composed and contemplative with the situation he’s in, aware of his complete control of the actions he’s pursuing and the consequences, and even pained by where his life has taken him. He then makes a conscious choice to follow through, rationalizing it out loud with logic, not the emotion that drives most crime. As he says later, he believes he is and always has been “bad,” and has iced the cake of his engagement in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Noir fatalism at its most raw, swollen and infected.
