Apparently, it was all shot in and around London, but the final effect isn’t always convincing for example, what’s supposed to be a street corner in Soho where a key fight takes place looks more like an empty anonymous stretch of Croydon pavement. But it’s not hard to see that the budget was modest and spread as thin as it possibly could be. If the intended audience for this is people who like true crime books with retro cover art then this will probably scratch their itch. (At one point, supporting character Frankie Fraser, played by Roland Manookian, ties a victim to the wall and throws darts at his face.) But the film’s nostalgic posturing – where boozy nights in the pub were soundtracked by skiffle-band covers, £80 was a lot of money and all prostitutes were pretty – is just as misleading and romanticised as anything that Helena Bonham Carter might have starred in before she became cool. Indeed, this recounting of the rise and fall of London mob boss Jack “Spot” Comer (Terry Stone) and his protege-cum-rival Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) mostly features lairy cockney men swearing and slicing each other up with cut-throat razors or finding even more inventive ways to inflict pain. This particular period drama, however, has no ladies in crinolines sipping tea. Well, this film’s horns are still pretty sharp.īull screened at the BFI London Film Festival, and is released on 5 November in the UK.S omehow, this true-crime-inspired gangster film brings to mind the 80s/90s concept of “heritage cinema”, a phrase that back in the day was applied to films by Merchant Ivory and any literary adaptation of the era. What exactly has motivated his revenge-lust? The explanation, when it does emerge, is simultaneously wildly overblown and a little bit anticlimactic. But the difference there is that Carter was trying to find out the truth here, Bull already knows the truth, and we don’t. And there’s Norm firing a sawn-off shotgun in an enclosed space that takes us into a weird slo-mo world where the blast freezes everything with a sickly flare like a flashbulb.Īnd, of course, Bull takes us back to the queasy world of Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, and the crime fiction of Ted Lewis – although Bull is probably even nastier, with his great love of chopping off people’s fingers and limbs with butcher’s knives. There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning: there’s the assassination Bull carries out at the beginning, with a gun he nonchalantly throws back into his driver’s car afterwards. Now Bull has returned to take a terrible, bloody vengeance on everyone. The escalating dispute led to a horrifying situation with a burning caravan, to which there are traumatised flashbacks. When the relationship broke down, Bull demanded sole custody of his son. But to Bull’s fury, Gemma became a smack addict and a neglectful mother to their adored little boy, and glowering Norm took her side in their many arguments. With his fanatical yet disciplined love of violence, Bull should have been Norm’s favoured employee, especially as he is also his son-in-law, having married Norm’s daughter Gemma (Lois Brabin-Platt), with whom he has a young son. In the midst of their chaos, two young lovers must navigate their dangerous circumstances to escape their affiliations and discover true love. Norm and the rest of his crew, including Marco (Jason Milligan), Gary (Kevin Harvey) and Beardy (David Nellist), are sometimes to be found in a greasy spoon, wearing hi-vis tabards, indicating some sort of building-trade front. Watch Gangland 2018 1 hr 28 min The city of Chicago is plagued by gang volence on both sides of the city in this modern retelling of the classic Romeo and Juliet story. Bull used to be a London gangland enforcer working for Norm (David Hayman), who, among many unsavoury concerns, runs a dodgy butcher’s business forcing food suppliers to accept his dodgy meat.
You don’t expect anything soft and relaxing from Maskell, and you don’t get it. Neil Maskell stars as the titular Bull, and for those of us who have enjoyed this actor’s powerfully charismatic and disturbing performances in the past, particularly in Ben Wheatley’s films, the casting should tip you off. But I have to admit to finding the female characters less interesting than they were in London to Brighton – and opinions might divide about the ending here, which the movie both telegraphs in advance and yet also diverts your attention away from, with a shuffling of the timeline.
There are brilliant moments here, and Bull is arguably as good as, say, Shane Meadows’s much-admired Dead Man’s Shoes, in a similarly relentless vein. Paul Andrew Williams’s revenge nightmare is a stomach-turningly violent gangland shocker that returns this film-maker to territory he first staked out with his 2006 feature debut, the lowlife thriller London to Brighton.
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