Recent viewings:
"Chato's Land"
Despite the blanket, often blind, negative criticism of any Michael Winner/Bronson film and the instant labelling of any such enterprise as trashy sleaze, "Chato's Land" is in fact a western very heavy on characterisation more than action.
An hour in and no one has died bar the pre-credit corpse that starts the posse (led by a thoughtful Jack Palance) off after Chato in the first place.
Winner goes out of his way (a brief forced stripping and a couple of shadowed full frontal shots) to avoid the kind of hardcore sensationalism that we would see in the likes of "Death Wish 2".The fact that the greatest threat to the posse (a sterling cast of solid support actors like Richard Basehart, James Whitmore, Simon Oakland, Ralph Waite and a still up and coming Richard Jordan) after Chato is themselves as internal struggles, hates and differing outlooks on justice conspire to rip them apart.
Bronson has little in the way of dialogue but looks magnificently rugged and sports a great physique (at odds with his great baggy, craggy face in fact!) and handles the sparse action scenes well.
But it is perhaps Palance who is the real surprise here. At first (as he equips himself for the posse and gets dressed in his faded Confederate uniform) he seems like he's going to give us another of his scene chewing, steely eyed villains to enjoy, but as the movie progresses we see in fact that his character is emotionally deep and fascinating. He's full of contradictions, bitterness, loss and corrupted thoughts of what justice means and how far any man should go. A conflict that leads to an unexpected finale for his character.
So forget the critics, "Chato's Land" may not be a masterpiece but it's perhaps the most thoughtful, multi-layed and serious work Winner has ever done, and shows (along with the original, superb, "Death wish"😉 that there can be (or perhaps could have been) more to Winner than meets the eye.
"Outlaw"
Oh dear! A vigilante film with almost no vigilante action!
a time wastiing opening leads to a promising set-up with absolutely NO crowd pleasing pay-off!
There should have been a good ten minutes taken from the first half of the film for a 'general scum' takedown montage before leaping into the main 'take out the bigshot gangster' plot.
That is afterall what the general joe schmo wants. Big time gangsters are not the threat we wnat to see dealt with to your average old lady who gets beaten to a pulp for her handbag!
Too much messed up moralising here as well really...The people they are meant to be after are scum that the law (as we see in real life every day) fail to do anything about, or the laughable judges let off or give joke sentences to.
We don't need the moralising crap of "this is ultimately wrong though" that Director Nick Love gives us.
The superb "Death Wish" never took this, so called, moral stance because it had the 70's balls to know that Kersey was doing harm only to those that deserved it and stuck by its lead character and it's basic reason for existing. "Outlaw" is too tainted by 21st century political correctness though.
And the fact that the only real character in Sean Bean's gang that does anything against the criminals is a pyschotic weasal security guard means that the (in my view) just motives of those with a genuine grievence and reason to go vigilante were kept in the background and hijacked.
Thus the acts of vengeance became not justice but simply the crazed actions of a nutter who is basically using the vigilante cover for his own psychosis.
Fair enough to have a character like that as long as the legit vigilantes are seen to be taking the action they suppoedly chose to take and sticking by the moral reasons they insist they have.
But in making the general psycho be the only one that does a damn thing to me really says that Love was simply sabotaging his characters actions and telling us that such actions are just plain wrong afterall!
And this despite all the build up (via the news stories of crime and the chav/thug encounters we are shown) that seemed to be very strongly siding with such vigilante actions being taken as a last resort. make your mind up Nick!
A wasted cast and a wasted chance to have a balls out vigilante flick at a time where, in the Uk at least, the public's faith in the law doing anything about the repeat offender thugs is at an all time low.
The fact is these vigilante's either refuse to take any action (no matter how damn justified) and normally make a mess of the few tiny things they do decie to do.
When I say that the biggest shootout the vigilante gang has is with the damn Police...you'll see what I mean!
WONDERFUL scenes with bob Hoskins though...his speech to Sean Bean was a brief but gorgeous leap back to his "Long Good Friday" days. But ultimately it was a grandstanding speech that led to absolutely no damn acction taking place and no justice dispensed!