Bull | Little White Lies

Bull

04 Nov 2021 / Released: 05 Nov 2021

Man with beard wearing a black jacket and looking thoughtful.
Man with beard wearing a black jacket and looking thoughtful.
3

Anticipation.

Neil Maskell dispensing bloody justice? Could be a giggle.

3

Enjoyment.

Great lead performance, startling violence, but little more than that.

3

In Retrospect.

Perfectly watchable but not for the squeamish (or demanding).

Neil Maskell is a man on a mis­sion in writer/​director Paul Andrew Williams’ furi­ous and for­mu­la­ic revenge thriller.

With the excep­tion of the com­ing-of-age dra­ma, the revenge thriller must be the most well-worn sto­ry tem­plate in all of cin­e­ma. There’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with using revenge as a protagonist’s pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion but there needs to be some­thing unique about the way it’s depict­ed to prop­er­ly piqué audi­ence interest.

With Bull, writer/​director Paul Andrew Williams’ USP is the grue­some, unflinch­ing man­ner in which his title char­ac­ter metes out pun­ish­ment to the for­mer friends and fam­i­ly who have wronged him. Neil Maskell plays the brood­ing Bull, a for­mer enforcer in a vicious crim­i­nal crew led by his father-in-law Norm (David Hey­man, delight­ful­ly unpleasant).

Through a series of flash­backs we grad­u­al­ly that learn Bull’s rela­tion­ship with Norm’s daugh­ter Gem­ma (Lois Bra­bin-Platt) evi­dent­ly col­lapsed at least part­ly because of her hero­in use and an affair with one of Bull’s col­leagues. Bull want­ed cus­tody of their son Aiden but noth­ing to do with Gem­ma. Norm, as the arche­typ­al vil­lain­ous patri­arch, was nev­er going to allow that. A decade after a hor­rif­ic event that sug­gests Norm has killed either Bull, Aiden or both, Bull makes a return and no one will be spared.

Cin­e­matog­ra­phers Ben Chads and Vanes­sa Whyte are often as unspar­ing as Bull him­self. We see close-ups of stab­bings, a limb being ampu­tat­ed, fin­gers being sev­ered and shoot­ings. The vio­lence is stom­ach-churn­ing but effec­tive. Bull has no prob­lem employ­ing the meth­ods he used while work­ing for Norm on his old col­leagues. Visu­al­ly, the pain inflict­ed by Bull and a repeat­ed image of a car­a­van burn­ing are of most sig­nif­i­cance. While the film is well-shot, with the queasy faces of Bull’s vic­tims telling a sto­ry of impend­ing and con­tin­u­ing hor­ror, geo­graph­i­cal­ly it is some­what anonymous.

Maskell is as depend­able as ever, mas­ter­ful­ly going up through the gears of rage as need dic­tates. His skill as an actor lies in being ful­ly believ­able as the bloke who’d cheer­ful­ly join you for a pint, but also the one who would glass you when he fin­ished his. The rest of the cast are fine but it’s Maskell’s film and per­haps his best per­for­mance since Kill List, even if the Ben Wheat­ley film Bull most recalls is Down Ter­race.

Things run out of steam towards the end with a cou­ple of super­flu­ous scenes and it would have been inter­est­ing to have had some clear jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Gemma’s behav­iour that kicked things off – was she tired of the over­all life of crime or was Bull him­self specif­i­cal­ly at fault for her nar­cot­ic slide? That said, Williams and Maskell have deliv­ered an effec­tive, sav­age revenge thriller – as long as one’s expec­ta­tions are moderate.

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