DEAD MAN DOWN (MA) teams Colin Farrell with the original girl with the dragon tattoo, Noomi Rapace, in a screwball guns a blazing revenger. It reteams Rapace with her Dargon Tatoo director, Niels Arden Oplev in his American feature debut. This is a shoot ‘em up that shatters preconceptions that the genre is in danger of being just unimaginative dross.
Opening the Spanish Film Festival tomorrow and then going into general release shortly after, A GUN IN EACH HAND evokes some swaggering macho Western, but in this case of this Catalan comedy, it’s a delicious and sublime irony. An ensemble piece about a bunch of Barcelona based boys – middle aged men, but still boys – coming to terms with their failures with women, careers, and life in general.
The fact that home is an old drive-in is amazingly symbolic – the screen that projected white fella dream time is now run down and obsolete- its surrounded by a big sky that’s a natural planetarium at night and rock paintings that are ancient and exciting. As one character says of them–better than Tolkein.
