Lawless (2012)

This was an incredibly stupid movie.

I hate that that’s how I need to start this review, but that’s what it was: stupid. I spent two hours watching one man make the worst possible decision at every step, face the consequences of it, then make another incompetent decision, then somehow end with him on top.

What an absolute waste of my time.

***

“Lawless” (2012) was based on the book The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, published in 2008. Matt Bondurant is the grandson of Jack Bondurant, of the Bondurant clan from Franklin, Virginia – a family that made a name for itself selling moonshine in Prohibition-era America.
That means the movie was based on a book based on what was probably grand-pappy’s very embellished version of what happened back in the 1930s, because frankly, this movie felt like a work of self-aggrandizing fiction far more than anything that could have plausibly happened.

Per the movie, everything was relatively fine and dandy in Franklin County until the Virginia DA hired a creepy prosecutor from Chicago to come down and clear out all the moonshiners.
Now, because Americans are aggressively allergic to someone telling them they can’t do something, the creepy, flamboyant cop telling country boys that they can’t sell their liquor set off a powder keg of murders.

The Bondurant brothers, Jack (Shia LeBouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy), and Howard (Jason Clarke), made their living selling moonshine in and around Franklin County: Forrest was the brains, Howard was the brawn, and Jack was the screw-up. I think we were supposed to find Jack’s blundering missteps endearing in some way, despite the fact that his repeated bad decisions are what drove the movie forward and kept getting people killed.
Creepy cop Charley Rakes (Guy Pearce) looked like an alien wearing a human skin suit: he had no eyebrows, his skin looked weirdly stretched out, he had a 1/2” thick hard part down the center of his head, and he had an accent that sounded like he was trying to sound Midwestern Standard based solely on someone else’s description of it.
Jack, playing the role of the village idiot, decided he wanted to be a larger part of the illicit family business and stumbled his way through a series of incredibly bad decisions that almost got him and his brothers killed on multiple occasions: he went smuggling on his own without proper planning, got himself mixed up with a gang without knowing how to fight (and was saved by a Deus Ex Machina), and started a solo shootout that absolutely should have killed him.
Unfortunately he survived all of the above, as did his brothers.

The ‘cover’ business that the Bondurant boys had was the family-owned greasy spoon, where tired locals would come in for a bite and a drink. Out of nowhere, gorgeous red-head Maggie (Jessica Chastain) appeared and asked for a job at the restaurant, which Forrest agreed to without so much as a second thought. Beyond that though, Maggie’s role in the story was hollow and two-dimensional; it felt like a casting choice far below the quality that Jessica Chastain should have taken, as Maggie was little more than a romantic prize to be won. She had very little character autonomy as she seemed to exist simply as a pretty face and to react to the plot.
On top of that: a topless scene of Maggie felt both unnecessary to the plot and uncomfortable to me as an audience member, considering the source material was Matt Bondurant’s great-aunt.
I realize that Hollywood likes to add titillating details to movies to catch audience attention, but that just felt gross.

There were many stupid events in this, but here’s the least congruous:
In one scene, two goons were in the restaurant harassing Maggie. Forrest stepped in, thoroughly beat the shit out of them, and threw them out the front door. It was the kind of beating that seemed like they certainly shouldn’t have recovered from.Then Maggie left for the evening and Forrest went out to check on his truck, whereupon the goons had magically regained their full powers and jumped him, graphically slitting his throat.
In a sudden desire to do some character building, Maggie turned around to tell Forrest a dark detail of her past life, only to walk into the darkened restaurant and get jumped and raped by the two goons.
But… why were they there? I get that they’d harassed her earlier in a belligerently misogynistic manner, so adding rape to the docket wasn’t surprising, but how long were the two men going to wait? Was their plan to simply stand in the restaurant as long as it took for her to show up for work the next day?
Furthermore: Forrest’s throat was slit, partial-decapitation style. He was on the far side of his truck from where Maggie parked when she returned, so there’s no way she should have been able to see him, laying on the ground in the middle of the night.
Which means that, in an era long before blood transfusions and limb-reattachment surgeries, Maggie got raped, dragged a dying Forrest to the hospital, doctors put in a few magic stitches later, and Forrest was alive and well and capable of talking again in no time.
His survival was impossible at best.
And Maggie’s rape lead to… nothing. No revenge killing, no redemption arc for the goons, no chance for Jack to step up and do some good. It was just a very uncomfortable few minutes and a character detail that didn’t lead anywhere.
I get it: real life atrocities rarely end with a nice little bow, but that’s not an excuse when you’re trying to tell a story with a time limit, which means everything you include needs to build the story or develop a character in some way.

There was also a scene where Jack put moonshine in the gas tank of a car to no deleterious effects. I know ethanol engines are a thing, and I know there used to be iterations of it as far back as some of the earliest cars, but you can’t just pour high-proof alcohol into a gasoline-powered engine and expect it to function properly – that’s not how it works.

On top of the topless Maggie scene, there were also back to back clips of other topless ladies, neither of which contributed anything to the scenes they were in either.
One was a woman in her nightclothes, running scared down the road. The other was a black woman – presumably a prostitute – sitting on Rakes’s bed. That’s it. All of those women just were, in a way that made me think the director wanted to have naked women because he could. His movie earned an “R” rating due to the gore and cursing, so why not add a few bare breasts?
Because they’re dog-shit cookies, that’s why.

There weren’t many special effects here, but lots of good set pieces and props. There were plenty of era-appropriate cars and outfits and the women had old-style hair-dos, so none of that seemed out of place.
There was also a lot of violence, and thus a lot of (fake) blood. Some of it actually made me kind of nauseous, as it felt to be too much, like watching Forrest’s throat get cut. The violence and gore isn’t what made me uncomfortable; it was the relish with which everyone seemed to do it. Every character who hurt or killed another character seemed to take a perverse enjoyment out of it – taking an extra shot with a gun, and extra stab with a knife, an extra punch with brass knuckles.
It all had a weird air of sadism attached.

The music was easily the best part of this. There was a mixture of fiddle music, folk-tunes, and stuff that would sound quite at home during a showdown in a spaghetti western.

I absolutely cannot recommend this movie. It was two hours of my COVID quarantine life that I’ll never get back, no matter how much I want it.
It was bloated, incongruous, and there was no one I wanted to root for. I spent the first 20 minutes wondering when I was going to find something to care about, and then the other 100 minutes wishing that it would just end.
This was easily the worst “based on a true story” movie I’ve ever seen.