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41 out of 45 people found the following review useful: Dark, Sharp, Shrewd: Magnificent., 2 April 2001 Author: unterpotaten from London, England
The first thing I notice is the cover-jacket. It is littered with the critic's gushing praise ; ` Diamond-edged performances' spews one filmic muso.Hmmm...I'm immediately suspicious. Films The Truman Show and Existenz also garnered such critical acclaim yet, suspiciously and unfortunately, seemed to do absolutely nothing for me.So how does Gangster No.1 fare?Well, ladies and gents, believe the hype. If Gangster No 1 was a man, it would be diamond geezer.Gangster No1 is a gem, albeit a very dark one. A brutal black comedy and an ultra-hip crime-flick in one - it's a cockney masterpiece, a genuine Pearly King of a movie.The year is 1968 and our eponymous hero (we only ever know him as `Gangster') is taken under the wing of Freddie Mays, the quintessential East End gangleader. Though Freddie is young he has already earned himself a chilling moniker, the 'Butcher of Mayfair', and a great wad of cash. Gangster begins working for Freddie, collects debts here, breaks a few legs there, but soon has his eyes on the bigger prize - to be Gangster No.1. To be like Freddie. Soon Gangster is plotting his ascent, murdering fellow gang members and precipitating an internecine gang war on his way up the ladder.So far, so unoriginal, I hear you say. But what distinguishes Gangster No.1 from its rather lame contemporaries (think Circus and 24 Hours in London) is its razor-sharp dialogue and superb performances. The scene where our gangster confronts a gang member suspected of being in cohoots with a rival is simply electrifying.Paul Bettany manages to be menacing, piteous and ultra-cool all at once with a frighteningly realistic turn in the title role. David Thewlis too, as Freddie Mays, is faultless. Malcolm McDowell provides a suitably cockney-fied voice over, but later reappearing in person as an older version of our Gangster to provide the motivation behind the insightful denounement.One slight criticism. The old `end of act-two problem' rears its ugly head at around an hour and fifteen minutes. Yes, the film becomes bogged down rather as Malcolm McDowell goes on a panicky cockney walkabout waiting for Freddie Mays to be released from prison. And when the two finally meet, in what was once Freddie May's luxury 60's pad, the scene isn't quite as explosive as you'd hoped it might be.Nevertheless, Gangster No1 is an excellent film. A credible gangster flick, a stylish revisiting of the 60's East End, a cracking script, and spot-on dialogue.Oh and the critics were right, the performances are ` diamond -edged'. Funny that.
29 out of 32 people found the following review useful: My brief review of the film, 6 April 2005 Author: sol- from Perth, Australia
The story might be rather ordinary and it may become less interesting after the first hour or so, but this is generally intriguing stuff. The film is effectively narrated and performed by Malcolm McDowell, but Paul Bettany is the one who really shines here, replicating McDowell's charisma as an uncaring and violent youth, whilst also injecting some of his own spirit into his character. The film is rather clever in fact with how it uses McDowell and what he has come to stand for, with a number of interesting echoes of A Clockwork Orange throughout the film. The biggest problem that I found in the whole production was that the flashbacks to the 1960s looked just like the present with no feel for the era. But really, other than that and a story that is not out of the ordinary, this is a well made film with an interesting visual and audio style, and quality acting to top it all off.
22 out of 24 people found the following review useful: A Great Movie of Gangsters, 12 August 2003 Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The story begins in 1999, with an old gangster performed by Malcolm McDowell being advised that Freddie Mays (David Thewlis) would leave jail after thirty years in prison. His mood changes and he recalls 1968, when he was a young punk (performed by Paul Bettany), and he joined Freddie Mays' gang, his envy of his mob boss and his betrayal. The whole story of these two characters is presented slowly, alternating violent and luxury places and action. I liked this movie a lot. I would dare to say that it mixes 'Goodfellas', 'Casino', 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Reservoir Dogs'. Paul Bettany has a great performance as a psycho-killer: differently of those sadists in Hollywood movies that make grimaces, the simple look and expression of Paul Bettany is enough to terrify the viewer. The direction is great, and there is one specific scene that I appreciated very much. When Freddie Mays invites Paul Bettany's character to have a drink in a nightclub: Freddie is giving his overcoat to the attendant and the image of Paul Bettany is reflected in the glass of the door exactly over Freddie. The selection of Paul Bettany for this role is perfect, but why not ages him through make-up? Malcolm McDowell looks totally different from Paul Bettany! My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Os Gangsters" ("The Gangsters")
20 out of 25 people found the following review useful: Social avarice with a sublime black humour, 13 November 2004 Author: lucidshard from UK
Its easy to see why people think this film is over violent and trying to shock, but then thats because they just don't get the finer nuances.This film is Excellent. The direction is amazing and Bettany, Thewlis and McDowell are all superb. The film runs from the point of view of the main character, Gangster, He shows how he got to the top of his game to be Gangster No1. All of the violence in the film makes a valid point some of it is horrific, none of it is unnecessary. The film also comments on the social avarice that penetrates our society, wealth, power and fame, I think the points it makes are truly justified.Why do some people dislike this film? They are uncomfortable with people being portrayed as being comfortable with violence, and thats because the director wants you to be, and because the Actors are so good at it. The film freaked me out in two scenes and there was no violence just excellent direction and Acting.Well worth watching, well worth buying on DVD.
14 out of 19 people found the following review useful: Superman, King Kong, and Gangster No. 1, 16 July 2002 Author: igm from Kelowna, BC
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I saw this movie to see Paul Bettany once again. I enjoyed his performances in <A Beautiful Mind> and <A Knight's Tale>, and wanted to see him in something heavier. Gangster No 1 seemed like the ideal role to see how he'd fare.He looks great decked out in Saville Row's finery, and has an unnerving composure which suits the role. The crude language seems more natural coming from him than from McDowell's older Gangster, or Thewlin's Mays. But the scenes in which he is supposed to be shooting daggers with his gaze at Karen, his rival for Mays' affection, seem comical and remind me of all the menace my five-year-old can muster in his stares.There is much lifted from other films, but McGuigan chooses his source material well. The <Reservoir Dogs> inspired the bubbly soundtrack to Lenny Taylor's goring, while <American Psycho> inspired the methodical disrobing and laying out of goring implements in that scene. <Get Shorty>'s Travolta gets the "Look into my eyes" thing right: it's cool apathy we're supposed to see, not Bettany's hammed-up intensity. <Good Fellas> inspires the "Business was never better" sequence, though McGuigan's lacks any significant depth, catching up on three decades in three minutes. Some original stuff too: While a gangster falls for the 'Bird' in this film, as in <Bugsy> or <Billy Bathgate>, it is not Mays' undoing, it is what saves him. The first person perspective on Taylor's goring works well, especially with fades in and out of consciousness. The jarring flash-forwards to Gangster's fierce attacks also work well. And I have never seen the c***-word used more liberally.What McGuigan, Bettany and McDowell do especially well is to reveal the emptiness of Gangster's relentlessly evil lifestyle. His disloyalty, jealousy, cruelty, vanity, and his hunger for power leave him paranoid, unloved, and suicidal. His touchstones of power and invulnerability---Superman and King Kong---are not human, perhaps showing how dehumanizing such physical invulnerability can be. But he remains vulnerable emotionally, and relies on bullying an old mate in Mays' crew, Mays' girlfriend, and Mays himself to stoke his fragile ego.A movie with some substance and style, but no virtuosos in this one.6 of 10
9 out of 10 people found the following review useful: "Paul Bettany shows his acting chops", 1 September 2005 Author: Matt_Layden from Canada
Gangster No.1 shows the rise and fall of a prominent English gangster. Malcolm McDowell is Gangster 55, telling the story in voice overs, and Paul Bettany shines as the Young Gangster giving a great performance, which carries the film from cookie cutter gangster film, to one of the best.This film is filled with inspirations from many others, such as Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, Get Shorty, etc. While some do work, such as "Look into my eyes", others don't, McGuigan, near the end of the film, fast forwards through decades in just a couple of minutes, we don't feel like we are with these people throughout their reign of terror in England. The film does have bits of originality, such as the "torture" while we see the FPV of the victim, fades in and out in his dying minutes, as the killer stands over his body, continuing the slaughter.Paul Bettany shows how good he is in this film as he carries it to another level. His eyes in his "Look into my eyes" scenes are so hollow and terrifying that you know if he was interrogating you, that he could and probably would kill you at anytime. He has the look in his sharp suits and the style. It's a shame no awards went his way. McDowell, to me in this film is a little bit of, I don't know how to say it, but he didn't do all that much for me. The rest of the cast holds up well, blending well with the story line and environments they are put in.The script is sharp and has a Goodfellas/Reservoir Dogs feel to it, the Goodfellas aspect shows the rise and fall, where as Reservoir Dogs, comes from it's dialouge. I've never heard the word c*nt used so many times. The film took it's time to showcase the rise of this young gangster from a common thug, to a crime lord. The one thing that did out me off though was the fact the he was just picked up out of a bar and given a spot. When Freddie goes to prison, that's when the young gangster takes his spot in being no. 1. Years go by and Freddie finally is released, while McDowell eagerly awaits his return, he expect some conflict, but what he get is a let down, I won't ruin what happens, but you'd expect something explosive.So Gangster No. 1 showcases great performances from the actors involved and shows a great story that takes it time, instead of bang bang, you're dead. The film just lacks that one special thing to take it to greatness, above and beyond those other movies, but for now, it can just be the one to stand out.
16 out of 25 people found the following review useful: McDowell redivivus, 13 July 2002 Author: nunculus (cosmovitelli@mediaone.net) from los angeles
What a mug! The evil-harlequin mask of Malcolm McDowell, so familiar from those bugeyed closeups of him "mounching lumpchiks of toast" in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, has aged into a fabulous ruin. And one of the pleasures of the glib, slick, cocky, brutal, shallow, and terrifically entertaining GANGSTER NO. 1 is in the realization that McDowell is the same McDowell--his voiceover has the same energetic sneer it had 31 years ago in CLOCKWORK. He's the same guy under a withered and weathered facade. As Gangster No. 1--a sociopath with a schoolgirl crush on his boss, spit-shined David Thewlis--McDowell brings you into the succulent pleasures of aged corruption and long-swallowed brutality. No. 1's nuttiness--a kind of belch of guilt, generally released in Francis Bacon-derivative silent screams--seems, for a while, like fun. Paul Bettany, playing Young No. 1, has a great, lizardlike, histrionic deadpan--he keeps telling his victims "Look into my eyes!" as if something scary and deep were hidden there. (Instead, there is zero--an effect Young No. 1 may be unaware of.) The movie takes such a jaunty and directorially piquant view of its own shin-kicking nihilism that you can't help but play along; until the moralizing but utterly earned finale sets you on your ear.Not deep stuff--not even as deep as the superbly unself-reflective head-smackers who made up GOODFELLAS' crew. But Saffron Burrows, as a Cockney chanteuse who's mad in love with Thewlis' Mr. Big, brings you back to the days of much-posher-and-prettier-than-their-parts British character actresses. (Could Burrows in fact be the Susannah York of the millennium?) And the director, Paul McGuigan, and Bettany keep the joint jumpin'. Why did this get such a crummy release? There's been almost nothing this year as sheerly, undilutedly fun.
14 out of 22 people found the following review useful: COCKNEY CAGNEYS, 2 July 2002 Author: george.schmidt (george.schmidt@hbo.com) from fairview, nj
GANGSTER NO.1 (2002) *** Malcolm McDowell, Paul Bettany, David Thewlis, Saffron Burrows. Bloody good Brit flick about English thugs recalled in flashback by McDowell and portrayed by Bettany (both equally excellent in a teeth-gnashing kind of way) recollecting their bumpy ride to the top and rocky relationship with head kingpin Thewlis getting in the way. Graphically violent yet smartly directed by Paul McGuigan eschewing stylistic violence for violence sake and encapsulating the Mod 60s effectively.
18 out of 30 people found the following review useful: Very good, under-rated and LIMEY-like., 19 June 2000 Author: isidore-lucien ducasse (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from montevideo, uruguay
Gangsters are vicious, murderous thugs, whose power is based on uniform, military might, a preying on the weak and a contempt for democracy. Nazis were vicious, murderous thugs whose power was based on uniform, military might, a preying on the weak and a contempt for democracy. Ergo, gangsters are fascists, and, double ergo, films which portray gangsters without a wagging finger are also fascist. This is the level of critical debate in the UK at the moment, that has greeted the recent slew of British gangster films in the wake of LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS. One misinformed hack in a major broadsheet even insinuated a link between this movement and recent, violent London crime.The problem with these films is an aesthetic, not an ethical one, and the type of ignorant criticism they have drawn reveals a lingering bourgeois contempt for a genre that has proved over the decades to be infinitely varied, subtle, adaptable, but, most importantly, through an awesomely powerful iconography, capable of exploring ideas about society and the individual, modernisation, capitalism, dissent, cinema, masculinity, violence, the body, role-play, psychology, sociology, metaphysics. Can a genre embraced and remodelled by directors as diverse as Feuillade, Von Sternberg, Hawks, Lang, Lewis, Melville, Godard, Suzuki, Coppola, Scorcese, Kitano, among many others be considered negligible? The problem with these new films, as I say, is not that they are overly violent or glamorise crime, but that they are ineptly made, hackneyed, opportunistic, with their makers revealing little knowledge of, or love for, the genre in which they're working.It's a pity for GANGSTER NO. 1 that it got caught up in this cycle, because it is a very good film, that maybe fails only in overambition, and that's not something we get to complain about very often. Ironically, the film's nearest model is not its sorry peers, or even archetypal classics like GET CARTER, but an American film, Soderbergh's THE LIMEY. Maybe these directors' non-Englishness (MacGuigan is Irish) allows them to cut through the phoney nostalgia more easily than native filmmakers, but their dismantling of gangster mythology is almost Melvillean (eg LE DOULOS).There is the same fluidity here as in LIMEY, the same sense of the past's stranglehold on the present, the same impatience with genre's limits, with the impossibility of family, with the stifling of humanity by barbaric codes and ideals. MacGuigan goes one further than Soderbergh - both directors emphasis role-playing, casting iconic 60s stars who seem to be making it up as they go along, having a laugh, trying on accents and clothes, but while Terence Stamp achieves some kind of grace, Malcolm MacDowall goes very uncoolly mad.There are three pointers in the first ten minutes that tell us where the film is going in its refusal to glamorise, to mythologise. First is the soundtrack, which is not the pumping macho nostalgic music beloved of the LOCK STOCK wannabes, but Sacha Distel - sung with heartbreaking sincerity by Neil Hannon, but Sacha Distel none the less. Secondly, the film opens at a business-like dinner of old gangsters blustering about the old times, MacDowell louder than most. If the flippant editing didn't tell us, the bathetic mocking of MacDowell when he leaves to relieve himself suggests that we shouldn't take everything he says too faithfully (or, in his straight-to-camera gesture, that he knows a lot more, eg about these 'friends', than he's letting on - is he a godlike creator?). In the third scene, champagne glass beside his feet, we notice his aim isn't quite what it was, and the title takes on rather a different, less iconic meaning.It is this man who tells the story, and it quickly becomes clear that he is a raving lunatic, and thus as reliable as Humbert or M. This has two effects - every scene becomes infected by his madness, is heightened, in terms of colour and composition, by the way he sees the world, which is hightly unstable and schizophrenic, alternately jokey and horribly violent, with certain markers recurring in a kind of dream loop.Secondly, we must look beyond his words to find the truth of each scene, forcing the viewer to play detective. This takes the power away from MacDowell, which is appropriate in a film about doubles, about hoow one man steals another man's identity (hence the foregrounding of mirrors, reflections, as well as the commodities that define people), only to lose his own.MacDowell is never known by a name (his character is played by two actors, the others by one), and becomes a mere cipher, though with very real, frightening power, while Frankie remains essentially himself, his image a mere show of strength, never his whole self. The style reinforces this, and perhaps reflects MacGuigan's background in advertising, but neither Scott nor Parker ever rooted their style in character to such effect, and the fragmentation, heightening and distortion of imagery could have two meanings - they reveal a chaotic world which MacDowell, with all his will, and figured in his voiceover, has managed to unify through the power of his identity and voice; or they are a sign of breakdown. The extraordinary coda reveals which.There have been complaints about the excessive violence of this film, but these scenes have a hallucinatory, ritualistic quality appropriate to a highly disciplined madman. GANGSTER's abstraction - that it's subject is gangster mythology rather than one particular protagonist per se, does not mean that it avoids social grounding - the vivid recreation of 60s London, only makes the unaccountable, inexplicable appearance of this phenomenon all the more alarming.
14 out of 23 people found the following review useful: A 'Fast Take' on another gangster film..., 24 September 2001 Author: giancarlo de lisi from Montreal, Canada
Ever since the release of Quentin Tarantino's crime drama 'Pulp Fiction'; it seems as if every other crime drama must reinvent itself. 'Gangster No. 1' falls into that category and while having many flaws, it still manages to capture the audience's attention with its' engaging tale.This dark, stylish and graphic crime flick is the creation of UK director Paul McGuigan whose past efforts include 'The Acid House' and 'Morality Play'. And while it is crude, vulgar, violent and anti-climactic, it has all the characteristics one seeks for a crime film. The film opens with a stunning sequence in which a terribly miscast Malcolm McDowell retells his rise from a lonely soldier in a Crime Family to the head of the organization.Paul Bettany plays McDowell's younger self mysteriously called Gangster 55; who does a superb job at capturing the rapturous rage of this young criminal. While working under Freddie Mays; played with an incredible sense of apathy by David Thewlis, we see Bettany/McDowell's character eye his position in this family on a much wider scale.The film spans itself over 30 years and we see some superb performances from Paul Bettany, David Thewlis and Saffron Burrows. Yet, while the cinematography is stunning, the film's scale inventive and the performances outstanding - Malcolm McDowell is completely miscast. While his body of work displays his range and his acting skills a tremendous attribute, simply put - he was put in this film to sell to markets. Thewlis who also plays Mays thirty years into the future wears make up for his role and does a fine job, while Bettany's older self is played by McDowell and the scenes in which McDowell and Thewlis interact are quite uncomfortable because it simply does not feel right. McDowells' age difference empowers the scene and reminds us we are watching an actor with make-up, and another without - pretending to be the same age.Furthermore, this film will not please everyone. This is the kind of film that unravels before your very eyes. Yet, the plot reveals itself not by actions but by the characters. In a slow-paced, methodical manner, the film's story unrolls in a manner that some might see as slow and unexciting. Yet, in order to enjoy the film one must immerse himself or herself within the simple plot that is brought to the screen with a touch of elegance with Director McGuigan's stylistic nature and wit.While the film will not be hailed as one of the definitive gangster classics, it still is a good gangster film. And what could have brought it past the level of simply being a good watch is the disappointing last half-hour where our main character's older self (McDowell) is the focus of the film.The first hour is told in flashback narrative sequences where McDowell tells of his rise. While the first hour harbors many similarities to other films such as 'American Psycho' (the slow, bloody, torturous deaths) and 'Goodfellas' the soundtrack accompanying the build up to a scene); it is entertaining and a pleasure to watch. Yet, the last half-hour culminates in Malcolm McDowell's present day stance as the notorious leader and his attempt to stay number one. Unfortunately, McDowells' performance pales incomparison to Bettany's and the unfortunate over the top performance by McDowell in a weak third act results in a good film not becoming a great film.Rating: **
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