Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
May 12, 2006
An Ex-Soldier Looks for Revenge in 'Dead Man's Shoes'
By LAURA KERN
Published: May 12, 2006

With its raw, grainy texture and forceful sense of urgency, Shane Meadows's unsparing revenge thriller "Dead Man's Shoes" is reminiscent of a kind of film prominent in the 1970's, most notably Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs."



Like a cross between that film's antihero, a nonthreatening everyman forced to take violent measures, and the unraveling war veteran Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver," the always fantastic Paddy Considine evokes both sensitivity and explosiveness as Richard, a troubled ex-soldier who returns to his hometown in northern England with payback on his mind.



The power of the performance by Mr. Considine, who wrote the script with Mr. Meadows, is even more extraordinary, considering that his character's complex psyche is woefully unexplored, and that there are long stretches in which he is absent from the screen. The main attraction is the gang of loathsome thugs who horribly mistreated Richard's mentally disabled younger brother years earlier, as they are at first harmlessly toyed with before meeting much direr fates at the hands of their personal grim reaper.



That bloody retribution makes "good guys" the equals of the original wrongdoers is an overused moral, and this film, though told with style and authority, ultimately doesn't have anything fresh to say. Despite some hints at conscience and humanity, "Dead Man's Shoes" is a typical slasher film at the core; Richard even wears a mask as he cruelly and methodically picks off his victims.



Dead Man's Shoes


this is one film that passed me by(living in NZ its not hard) but im desperate to see-anyone seen it?

Dead Man's Shoes


Philip French
Sunday October 3, 2004
The Observer


Dead Man's Shoes
(86 mins, 18)
Directed by Shane Meadows; starring Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell
While he's hardly the British cinema's Thomas Hardy, the Nottinghamshire film-maker Shane Meadows has developed a relationship to his own locality that is rare. Only Bill Forsyth, who, for a while, was the Capra of the Clyde, comes to mind. The underside of small-town Midlands life and the underclass that lives on rundown council estates have provided the subject matter for all his films. Dead Man's Shoes is his most accomplished, though it retains the harsh feeling and rough surface of its predecessors.


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It begins mysteriously, portentously, with two youngish men walking purposefully over moorland under a lowering sky. Their progress is intercut with home movies of children playing. The pair arrive at an inert, seemingly unpopulated village in a valley that's overlooked by a gutted mansion on a hill above.
We soon learn they are Richard (Paddy Considine), an ex-squaddie from the Parachute Regiment, and his much-loved younger brother, Anthony (Toby Kebbell), who has learning difficulties. As they move through the village, a series of flashbacks in grainy sepia begins, gradually revealing what happened some years before to Anthony.

On the soundtrack, Richard comments ominously about evil, sin, retribution. In a pub, Richard encounters a dim young drug dealer and they seem to recognise each other. The pusher goes to his associates, a seedy collection led by the vicious Sonny (Gary Stretch), to report his arrival. They feel threatened, for good reason. During a drunken, drug-fuelled spree seven years before, they had abused and humiliated Anthony. They are not essentially evil, but they have collectively committed a transgressive act that demands extrajudicial punishment.

Meadows called his previous film Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, a jokey reference to the spaghetti western it parodied. This film is also much influenced by revenge westerns, its probable models being Eastwood's Hang ' Em High and High Plains Drifter, as well as by Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and horror flicks of the Halloween kind.

At first, the mode is teasingly comic as Richard plays with his quarries, dressed in a gas mask that gives him the look (so one scared victim thinks) of an elephant. He ransacks a room, steals a consignment of cocaine, paints their hair and faces as they sleep. After that, things get steadily more violent, escalating towards a climax in which past meets present.

This is a very skilful, superbly edited piece of moviemaking, intriguing, gripping. It's steeped in a particular area, yet weaves together social realism and myth the way High Plains Drifter does. Ultimately, it's a moral fable of a religious kind, which is underlined by the final sequence when pop and country music give way to Arvo Pärt's De Profundis .

The acting has the raw reality we find in Ken Loach and, at the centre, as Richard, there's another striking performance by Paddy Considine, who co-scripted the picture with Meadows. After making his feature debut in Meadows's A Room for Romeo Brass, Considine has appeared in Pawel Pawlikowski's The Last Resort, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People and Jim Sheridan's In America. He's established himself as one of the key actors in British independent cinema, an edgy, unpredictable presence. Here, he switches in an instant from seductive friendliness to blood-freezing menace, determining the movie's tone and focusing its moral thrust.