Bronson

Now that's entertainment!

This film chronicles the life and times of the "most violent prisoner in Britain", one Michael Peterson aka Charles Bronson. It's an interesting biopic starring Tom Hardy as the thuggish yet entertaining Bronson casting the character in the light of a showman telling his story in a sort of one man show before an imaginary audience.

Michael Peterson was a Welsh born hooligan who ran afoul of the law and was imprisoned in 1974 for armed robbery. He received a sentence of seven years but that was extended multiple times due to his constant assaults on guards. During his stay as a guest of Her Majesty's Prison Service, he was transferred over 120 different times leading to his institutionalization at Broadmore Maximum Security Hospital where he took several hostages and held a 47-hour long standoff with police from the roof of the hospital, causing more than £750,000 worth of damage to the hospital making him the most expensive prisoner Britain had ever hosted. So they certified him sane and released him. For the next sixty-nine days, Peterson took up with a former inmate who promoted illegal, bare-knuckle fights and Peterson changed his name to Charles Bronson to improve his image in the fights but was imprisoned again after he robbed a jewelry store to impress a woman. And except for another brief period of freedom in 1992, he has remained behind bars, much of that time in solitary confinement because of his combative nature.

The amazing thing about this film is not the basic character of Charles Bronson, but rather how they go about crafting a narrative around the individual, where the style of the storytelling is more impressive than the story itself. There are scenes where Hardy is dressed in a beautiful suit, painted up in pancake make-up and black paint before a theater full of tuxedoed and evening gowned spectators with classical music playing and those scenes are absolutely beautiful in a mad sort of way. I mean, there is nothing all that likable about Bronson from a surface value, and yet this is an absolute joy to watch.

I Love You Philip Morris

This is one of those movies where the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" really applies since the trailers I saw truly buried the lead. The trailers would have you believe that this is a movie about a zany, prison love affair between the characters portrayed by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, and yes, that is a large part of the film. What the movie is really about is the life of Stephen Jay Russell, a confidence man in the vein of Frank Abagnale Jr., who has escaped from Texas prisons so many times that, my opinion is that he's been sentenced out of spite, he is currently serving a prison sentence set to end on July 12th, 2140. And while there are amusing bits to the story, it is not as madcap as the trailers would lead you to believe.

Biographical films are always so hard to summarize since they cover such a large expanse of time and like to touch on several self-contained anecdotes of a person's life. And this one is no different except that the story touches on multiple scams, prison escapes, and gaming the system to free a lover that the pace is pretty frenetic but handled exquisitely giving you a developing picture of an interesting individual. And it is a very likeable picture which is something I generally don't find with bio-pics of criminals because, at the end of the day, they are criminals and it is at times difficult to empathize with a self-centered character that is only out for themselves. And perhaps that is why Stephen Russell is so likeable. Most of the crimes he committed later in his career were for the man he loved, and I don't care about the politics of it, a good love story is still a good love story.

Rating: B+