‘Starred Up’ is a savage journey toward anger management
MOVIE REVIEW
“Starred Up”
Grade: B
Starring Jack O’Connell, Ben Mendelsohn and Peter Ferdinando. Directed by David Mackenzie.
Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 46 minutes
Bottom line: An honest, brutal look at life behind bars.
By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
As unsettling as a hard slap to the face, “Starred Up” shocks the system. It marries ferocious, unnerving violence and waves of profanity to powerful, psychologically acute performances in a way that is intensely dramatic as well as almost unbearable to watch at times.
Those knockout performances come courtesy of rising star Jack O’Connell (the lead in the much-anticipated “Unbroken”) and Ben Mendelsohn, whose barely controlled malevolence was one of the highlights of the Australian crime drama “Animal Kingdom.”
Here they play two inmates in a British prison, each more unstoppably violent than the next. O’Connell’s Eric is only 19, but as the film opens he’s just been “starred up” — transferred from a juvenile prison to an adult one because he has proved impossible to control.
Neville, played by Mendelsohn, is considerably older and looks to be a bit more contained, but looks are deceptive. Neville turns out to be the enforcer for Dennis (Peter Ferdinando), the Machiavellian con who runs the prison’s illicit businesses, of which there are many, including buying off officials and guards when necessary.
Eric and Neville are so much alike in terms of savagery and rage you’d think they are father and son. In fact, with all the complications of lifelong estrangement that relationship implies, that’s what they are.
Set entirely inside a prison (and filmed inside Crumlin Road, a fully intact former institution in Belfast, Northern Ireland), “Starred Up” may sound like standard issue genre material. But though some conventional elements eventually emerge, for a pair of reasons this turns out to be genre pushed, and pushed hard, as far as it can go.
In fact, every single one of the multiple relationships inside the prison threatens to detonate at any moment, with the father-son relationship between Neville and Eric being especially incendiary.
With each person’s words and actions having the potential to literally destroy another’s life, we are immersed in all that brutality, listen to all manner of scabrous dialogue and feel as trapped behind these walls as any of the inmates. But it is the gift of “Starred Up” to make everyone intensely human as well, and that makes all the difference.
