There’s a feeling I miss in film, a grimy and nihilistic sheen from a bygone age where punks were still portrayed as dangerous urban hyenas and the streets were always dark and wet. Where protagonists almost certain to fail but doomed to try anyway in the face of heartless crime kingpins after being caught up circumstances beyond their control and no one had clean hands or consciences. Connor Marsden’s aptly named Violence nicely scratched that itch, giving us a lean and nasty neo noir thriller about a man desperate to escape a world that is apparently out to destroy him in every way possible.
Henry Violence is a man on a mission: get his beloved Charlotte and get the fuck out of the criminal underworld he’s been in for far too long. After his attempt at being reasonable with his girlfriend’s drug lord boss is rebuked, the reasonable Henry is forced to become unreasonable, fighting his way through the brutal punk underworld where enemies are around every corner and no one is who they say they are. Soon, he finds himself in a vicious gang war where both sides might just be gunning for him.
On paper this sounds like about a million other gritty movies from the ‘80s seeking to cash in on the punk aesthetic. What makes Violence stand out from the pack is the lack of any kind of finesse or stylization of the actual violence in this movie. Henry is not some secret kung fu wielding bad ass; he’s just a guy trying to make things right for himself so he can leave with a clean slate. There’s a palpable desperation to his character, a relatable panic in his every move that his beloved might not make it if he doesn’t get done what needs to get done. And I truly appreciate that this movie feels like what would happen if the Foot clan from the first live action TMNT movie got their own full-length film. This is a classic youth run amok story, something I miss from films from the ‘80s, movies like Suburbia and Return Of The Living Dead by the way of Walter Hill and Abel Ferrera. Marsden adds a bit of credibility to the film by making one of the warring gangs a group of militant straight edge punks, turning the film into something like a live action version of Earth Crisis’ “Wrath Of Sanity”. This isn’t some bigshot Hollywood producer using punks as bad guys because suburban Reaganites are terrified of them, this is someone who knows the deal drawing from the actual punk scene. (Bonus points for having the film scored by Nowhere 2 Run, a new project from former members of Code Orange who also play the club band in the movie).
Violence can come off as a bit self-serious at times, but in the end, it succeeds at painting a picture of a man on the brink of destruction, with almost nothing left to lose and willing to do anything to hold on to the one last good thing in his life. It’s an incredibly nihilistic and bleak film, but also a strangely hopeful one at the same time, in that it shows that even in the darkest of times someone can still find something worth fighting and dying for.
