This is an extremely stylish and complicated film that makes too many assumptions and takes too little creative license. It assumes the viewer already knows a great deal about infamous 1960s British gangster Charlie Richardson and his even more infamous trial for leading a "torture gang". And as it's structurally all over the map, bouncing back and forth through time and between distinctly different versions of Charlie and his fellow criminals, it refuses to organize his life into any sort of dramatic, thematic or emotional narrative. I came away from this movie with very little understanding of who the main character was or why he was important enough to merit a film about his life.
If you're going to watch this, you should be familiar enough with 1960s crime in Britain to remember both The Great Train Robbery and Charlie's criminal rivals, the Krays. Otherwise, you'll get buried under a blizzard of bewildering references and allusions. Even if you've seen the movies made about his contemporaries, you'll be left somewhat in the dark about Charlie's criminal activities, which are left largely nebulous except for the torture allegations and the film makes those out to be lies and exaggerations. Despite an electrifying performance by Luke Goss as the title character, this motion picture flounders about in the vague and fragmented nature of Charlie and his misadventures.
For example, the single most interesting thing about this story is when Charlie is enlisted by the government of South African to break in and steal the files of anti-Apartheid organizations in London. It builds up to Charlie being asked to spy on the British Prime Minister and then the whole thing goes away. As presented here, it's not at all clear if Charlie agreed to spy or declined and what happened after either decision. The subplot is just thrown out there and then taken away, both without a resolution or any sense of what it's supposed to say about Charlie and his era.
Writer/director Malcolm Needs also should have chosen to either tell the story of Charlie's life and basically end it with his arrest and trial or tell the story of the trial itself. Instead, he tries to treat each as entirely separate bits of cinema which are intertwined but never blended. If you presented the trial scenes and the rest of the movie individually, you'd think you were watching competing productions of the same story which strangely starred the same guy. It's like seeing segments of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone that have been spliced together with Kevin Costner's face superimposed on Kurt Russell's body.
I always enjoy the working class sensibility of British crime flicks and that comes through here as well. American storytelling imbues law breaking with a transgressive quality that is absent across the pond. The Brits present crime as another vocation, like being a baker or a plumber or a bricklayer, and the criminals aren't outlaws but recognized members of their larger society. That's made clear by how the torture allegations against Charlie and company are treated. Such behavior wouldn't be seen as excessive among American thugs, even in the 1960s, but this film presents those acts as so bizarre and extraordinary that they violate the social compact which tolerates "regular" thievery and violence.
Besides Goss' impressive work, this movie also has a machine gun pace of short, energetic scenes and nicely recreates the looser feel of a bigger and less regulated world. Its failure to define its main character and decide what's the most important thing about him, however, leave it marginally unsatisfying. I wouldn't warn you away from Charlie, but you might want to do some homework before giving it a look.
If you're going to watch this, you should be familiar enough with 1960s crime in Britain to remember both The Great Train Robbery and Charlie's criminal rivals, the Krays. Otherwise, you'll get buried under a blizzard of bewildering references and allusions. Even if you've seen the movies made about his contemporaries, you'll be left somewhat in the dark about Charlie's criminal activities, which are left largely nebulous except for the torture allegations and the film makes those out to be lies and exaggerations. Despite an electrifying performance by Luke Goss as the title character, this motion picture flounders about in the vague and fragmented nature of Charlie and his misadventures.
For example, the single most interesting thing about this story is when Charlie is enlisted by the government of South African to break in and steal the files of anti-Apartheid organizations in London. It builds up to Charlie being asked to spy on the British Prime Minister and then the whole thing goes away. As presented here, it's not at all clear if Charlie agreed to spy or declined and what happened after either decision. The subplot is just thrown out there and then taken away, both without a resolution or any sense of what it's supposed to say about Charlie and his era.
Writer/director Malcolm Needs also should have chosen to either tell the story of Charlie's life and basically end it with his arrest and trial or tell the story of the trial itself. Instead, he tries to treat each as entirely separate bits of cinema which are intertwined but never blended. If you presented the trial scenes and the rest of the movie individually, you'd think you were watching competing productions of the same story which strangely starred the same guy. It's like seeing segments of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone that have been spliced together with Kevin Costner's face superimposed on Kurt Russell's body.
I always enjoy the working class sensibility of British crime flicks and that comes through here as well. American storytelling imbues law breaking with a transgressive quality that is absent across the pond. The Brits present crime as another vocation, like being a baker or a plumber or a bricklayer, and the criminals aren't outlaws but recognized members of their larger society. That's made clear by how the torture allegations against Charlie and company are treated. Such behavior wouldn't be seen as excessive among American thugs, even in the 1960s, but this film presents those acts as so bizarre and extraordinary that they violate the social compact which tolerates "regular" thievery and violence.
Besides Goss' impressive work, this movie also has a machine gun pace of short, energetic scenes and nicely recreates the looser feel of a bigger and less regulated world. Its failure to define its main character and decide what's the most important thing about him, however, leave it marginally unsatisfying. I wouldn't warn you away from Charlie, but you might want to do some homework before giving it a look.
