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Title: Bronson

Country: UK (2009)

Genre: Thriller-Biopic

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Tom Hardy, Matt King, Kelly Adams

Plot

In 1974, 19 year old Michael Peterson decided that he wants to make a name for himself and so he attempted to rob a post office. He quickly gets caught and originally gets sentenced to 7 years in jail. In the end he has spend 34 years behind bars, 30 of which in solitary confinement. During that time he more and more became “Charles Bronson”, his ultra-violent alter ego. Due to his violent temper, the comitted hostage-takings and especially the fact that he was imprisoned in more than 120 prisons he soon receives the title of “Britain’s most violent prisoner”.

Review

This is not a movie for the mass-market but for friends of special movies. If you expect a conventional prison or gangster movie you will be disappointed. It is neither a profound social drama. Rather than anything else this biopic can be compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange”. The picture language, the theater-like production, much classic music and the central role of senseless violence… There actually are parallels. The movie is loosely based on the real biography of Michael Peterson, better known as his alter ego Charles Bronson who is said to be Britain’s most violent criminal. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn really did a great job here. He doesn’t give an explanation for Bronson’s motivation, only his desire to become famous. The actual heart of the movie, however, is the amazing one-man-show of Tom Hardy as Charles Bronson. With an expressive mustache and heaps of muscles he is Charlie Bronson. His acting is insistent in every scene. Thereby it isn’t the intention of the movie neither of his main actor to x-ray and understand it’s ambivalent protagonist. Until the credits, Charles Bronson remains an unsolved mystery which probably is the only way to really portrait him. Therefore the movie is more a brutal-bizarre, helpless making retrospection from Bronsons own point of view which is irreproducible. A very different but fascinating movie.

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