I wonder how long I can blame tardiness on my computer dying? At any rate, I'm glad I put this post off until now for reasons that will appear. This review of London Boulevard will contain spoilers of the very end, so if you're planning to watch it you should bear that in mind.
It took me some time to process exactly why I was so disappointed with London Boulevard. I don't mind a good tragedy and an unhappy ending, if proper to the story, can be very satisfying. (cf. Hamlet, etc.) But there seemed a qualitative difference to this movie and I believe I have discovered what it is. The answer is twofold and appears after the jump.
The first reason is that much of the violence in the movie served no purpose. I did not need to see a man's face smashed into the top of his glass to understand that these London hoods were violent, dangerous and largely indifferent to the suffering of others. This point was driven home to me by reading an article on the First Things website today by William Donio Jr. In it he refers to another article about the break that film and television made in the 1960's where the restraints that previously were in place that kept films from having that which should not be exhibited publicly for entertainment.
London Boulevard had much that was better left unseen and implied. Not only that, but the language (like so much of Brit pop culture) was relentlessly vulgar, crass and profane. Have the people of Shakespeare fallen so far that the only way they can refer to one another is by the most vulgar of slang terms for a woman's genitals? Is the only intensifier they know the F-word? It's depressing to contemplate how the great British Empire has fallen in less than 100 years.
The second reason is related to the first, but differs in specifics. The movie is about a man who, upon his release from prison, attempts to break with his past life and go straight. He has trouble disentangling himself from his old friends and ultimately this leads to his downfall. Early on a friend of his, an aging homeless man, is senselessly and brutally murdered by a young hoodlum. Filled with thoughts of revenge, the protagonist searches out the young man who committed the crime, but at the moment of truth he seems to experience a moment of pity and is merciful in allowing the young man to walk away unharmed and, indeed, even unaware of the danger he was in.
This is a subplot to the protagonist getting a job as a bodyguard/general handyman for an actress who is living like a recluse. His burgeoning relationship with her is his attempt to change his life and move on. Despite his best efforts, the man who runs the local mob does everything he can to pull him back in because of the protagonist's obvious talents. He resolves this situation by killing almost everyone in his path. But does his ultimate downfall come from the fact that he has resorted to murder and mayhem to solve his problems? No.
In fact, he is killed at the very end of the movie by the young man he spares in a moment of mercy. The young man has heard that he was being looked for and strikes, pre-emptively he thinks, and murders the protagonist. It is not his crimes that come back to hurt and haunt him, but his restraint and pity and mercy. And that just isn't right. We are often punished for our kindnesses, it is true, to quote another film of much higher quality. But this film ends not only with a hopeless, sad and down ending, but one that was engendered by the protagonist's virtues, not his sins. And that, I think, breaks faith with the basic tenets of good tragedy.
If you couldn't tell up to this point, I wouldn't recommend this film at all.
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