Bronson

I don't usually 'slag' films off, because I am a film maker myself and I know how much hard work goes into these films and how soul destroying it can be for the film makers when they aren't well received. However, with Bronson there was very little that I actually liked.

This film is based on a true story. It is about Charles Bronson, Britain's most violent criminal. Taking this into consideration you would expect there to be a lot of violence in the film. However, there is not. But that's okay because you would expect the violence that there is to be top notch. But it's not. I've seen student films that have had better fights in them. It wasn't the choreography, it was the actual fighting. It just looked... shit. It looked like Bronson was pretending to hit people instead of actually hitting them.

But sadly this isn't the only bad thing about the film. I found that throughout most of the film, nothing happened. The first half an hour was just a series of shots of him sat in his cell. Or at least that is what it felt like. And even these shots were bad.

The shot composition was awful. There were several times when it actually bugged me, and I was sat there thinking, "Why on Earth would someone use a shot like that? It is so ugly." And to make things worst a lot of the shots were held for too long. It was like, "Why are we still looking at this?"

Even the structure of the story was bad. Some of it was set in a theatre where Bronson would talk to the camera and basically tell his story. There's nothing wrong with this idea itself, except that he didn't really tell his story at all, it was as though he was just messing around on stage. And the rest of the film didn't really go anywhere. Just at the end it seemed to make some kind of progress in terms of story telling and then it just stopped and went back to how it started.

This film literally is a mess. The sad thing is that it could have been done way better. My advise, if you want to watch a great film set in prison then watch The Shawshank Redemption. And if you want to watch a film about violent criminals then give The Krays a go. It ain't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than Bronson.