Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A young man who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for robbing a post office ends up spending 30 years in solitary confinement. During this time, his own personality is supplanted by his alter ego, Charles Bronson.
Tom Hardy's volcanic, committed performance as Charles Bronson is the film's undeniable centerpiece — a towering, theatrical turn that anchors everything. Refn's direction is visually bold and expressionistic, with a striking stage-within-a-prison framing device that gives the film a genuinely singular, operatic quality unlike any other British crime film. Its conception and voice are truly distinctive. However, the plot is deliberately thin and episodic — it's more a character study/portrait than a structured narrative, and the ending fizzles without much resolution or dramatic payoff, leaving the film feeling incomplete as a story even as it succeeds as a cinematic experience.