Dead Man's Shoes Fails To Please Village Voice

Shane Meadows has been awarded almost iconic status as one of the pioneers of low budget filmmaking in Britain, which he certainly is, but some people find his work on screen doesn't always reach – on the audience satisfaction scale - the parts others claim it does reach. This week his latest opus Dead Man's Shoes opens Stateside in Greenwich Village, the heartland of New York's artistic and creative community. I turned to the Village Voice to see what their film critic Luke Y Thompson made of it.

Dead Man's Shoes

Directed by Shane Meadows

Magnolia, opens May 12, Cinema Village

Paddy Considine is an ex-soldier named Richard who comes home to a small town in England to see his retarded brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell), who had been hanging out with the local gang of drug-dealing thugs and been cruelly abused. Richard is out for blood, and after breaking into various gang members' houses and pulling pranks, he tells the ringleader, Sonny (Gary Stretch), that he'll kill them all—and they can even try to come and get him first if they'd like. Fortunately for Richard, Sonny's guys are the stupidest hoods in the world. Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting. Director Shane Meadows based the movie on a true story about a young man from his hometown who died. Presumably, then, Meadows gets some sort of catharsis out of it. Too bad we don't.

Luke Thompson's crit from Village Voice

The original crit is here....:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0619,thompson,73167,20.html