After a botched bank robbery attempt, the hard-living Constantine (Pattinson) and his mentally impaired younger brother Nick (Ben Safdie) are split up during a police chase. When Nick is captured and arrested, Constantine engages in drastic measures to get his brother home.
This thing is jarring, the stakes are high, and it's chalked full of danger. Every maximal scene is designed to get your heart racing. Its crafty visual style is often drenched in neon lights, especially deep red colors that signify caution, alarm, crisis, spilt blood, and pretty much everything bad. The film even evokes the horror genre at times--like the scene where Nick's entire face is wrapped in bandages during a dark hospital stay (1960's Eyes Without a Face came to mind), or the sweaty sequence that takes place in a haunted amusement park ride - after hours. Electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never's caustic score escalates the madness and greatly overwhelms the soundscape.
Robert Pattinson is incredible here (yes, we're way beyond the Twilight era), and it's not only his solid accent work, but everything else as well. He practically disappears into this character--a guy so entangled in doing what he truly believes is right that he's completely lost all sense of good and bad.
Just like its main character, the film digs itself so deep that it has a difficult time hitting a satisfactory conclusion, but sometimes that's what happens at the end of an adrenaline rush.
* 9/10 *
This thing is jarring, the stakes are high, and it's chalked full of danger. Every maximal scene is designed to get your heart racing. Its crafty visual style is often drenched in neon lights, especially deep red colors that signify caution, alarm, crisis, spilt blood, and pretty much everything bad. The film even evokes the horror genre at times--like the scene where Nick's entire face is wrapped in bandages during a dark hospital stay (1960's Eyes Without a Face came to mind), or the sweaty sequence that takes place in a haunted amusement park ride - after hours. Electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never's caustic score escalates the madness and greatly overwhelms the soundscape.
Robert Pattinson is incredible here (yes, we're way beyond the Twilight era), and it's not only his solid accent work, but everything else as well. He practically disappears into this character--a guy so entangled in doing what he truly believes is right that he's completely lost all sense of good and bad.
Just like its main character, the film digs itself so deep that it has a difficult time hitting a satisfactory conclusion, but sometimes that's what happens at the end of an adrenaline rush.
* 9/10 *
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