Bronson (2008)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Charles Bronson	Tom Hardy
Paul	Matt King

Review

The always hard-hitting Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) has turned to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for inspiration in bringing Britain's most notorious prisoner, Michael Peterson (aka Charles Bronson) to the big screen. It's a flamboyant, uncaring and self-justificatory piece with obvious art house inclinations. Whether Winding Refn chose this approach for lack of trustworthy material about Peterson's psychology and mental life is not for me to say, but it gives the film a stylistic and filmatic peculiarity (which may or may not work for you) as well as a thematic looseness which may evoke interest, but which also threatens to reduce the film's relevance. The acting is very good, with Hardy giving a massively powerful performance in the lead, but despite Bronson's artistic qualities, it has a self-indulgence which works as a wet blanket on this otherwise explosive material.