The Long Good Friday (1980)
Directed by John Mackenzie
In the late 1970s, Cockney crime boss Harold Shand, a gangster trying to become a legitimate property mogul, has big plans to get the American Mafia to bankroll his transformation of a derelict area of London into the possible venue for a future Olympic Games. However, a series of bombings targets his empire on the very weekend the Americans are in town. Shand is convinced there is a traitor in his organization, and sets out to eliminate the rat in typically ruthless fashion.
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What critics compared The Long Good Friday to
Running with the conceit that Fletcher is pitching this entire story as a movie script, the screenplay is also loaded with self-referential film jokes, including allusions to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and John Mackenzie's cult 1980 London gangster classic, The Long Good Friday .
Beyond regressive windbaggery, nothing justifies the two-hour running time: not the archaic soundtrack cues, nor the lame imitations of viral gang videos, nor the clanging late homage to 1980’s seminal Britflick “The Long Good Friday,” unfit to inhabit the same planet as its inspiration, let alone lace its boots.
A devoted fan of the crime genre, Ritchie peppers his script with a hefty dose of self-referential gags including a reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which Fletcher decrees as “a bit boring,” and John Mackenzie’s seminal 80s London gangster flick The Long Good Friday , which Ritchie has consistently taken heavy inspiration from.
This germ of an idea is that, whilst simultaneously being a homage to Ritchie’s own role in British film history, this is ultimately an ode to another crime classic; The Long Good Friday .
Asians, African-Americans, Jews and more are set up to be targets and punchlines and what is worse is that not only are the gags stretched to breaking point — a gag involving someone being called a “black bastard” and whether or not that is racist — but they are stolen from other projects i.e. the gag with the name Phuc is a gag from the teen comedy Superbad , the particular use of a pig is from the anthology TV series Black Mirror and of course, Ritchie’s insistent cribbing of the classic British crime flick The Long Good Friday (including the ending!) — which thankfully is not as blatant as it was in Rocknrolla.
The British gangster subgenre reached its peak 40 years ago with a lean, mean ditty called The Long Good Friday .
However, this is a film more reminiscent of The Long Good Friday than The Lavender Hill Mob.
Rather, Wrath of Man feels like a British crime movie from the 1970s or early 1980s, more akin to Get Carter or The Long Good Friday in its sense of quiet, dissolute brutality mixed in with an effort to keep the viewer in the dark.
This gripping drama recalls The Long Good Friday - also set in the get-rich-quick years of the early 80s - but unlike Bob Hoskins's brutal gang boss, Morales is an honest, nice guy "taking the path most right".
Imagine a New York version of The Long Good Friday and you’ll have some idea of where the plot is heading.
Avoid RocknRolla, keep the Lock, Stock DVD in the cupboard and acquire by any means possible the superior British gangster film The Long Good Friday.
ALMOST all London crime films since 1980 owe a debt to John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday but some owe more than others.
If “The Long Good Friday” (1980) were an Abbott and Costello movie, it would have looked and sounded a lot like this.
Driven by cockney bovver boy riffs culled from The Long Good Friday, Minder and The Sweeney, and a visual style remarkable for its relentless spray of music video techniques minus a strong personality and point of view, Ritchie's movies (the over-rated Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch) are fun but dumb.
There's an old-school bad guy named Lenny ( Tom Wilkinson , channeling Bob Hoskins in "The Long Good Friday") and a new-school Russian bad guy named Uri (Karel Roden, revisiting the shady Russki he played in "The Bourne Supremacy" ).
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From "Get Carter" and "The Long Good Friday" through "Croupier" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," U.K. filmmakers have shown a liking and facility for crime stories featuring hard guys tested by intolerable dilemmas.
That opening scene serves as a dark and funny omen for what follows in this stylish thriller that evokes numerous British crime dramas like "Performance" and "The Long Good Friday."
"Sexy Beast" falls somewhere between the best of the genre - "The Long Good Friday," for example, and the stylish hijinks of Guy Ritchie's "Snatch."
The purposeful violence of Brit mobsters at cross-purposes recalls Villain (which, not incidentally, also co-starred Ian McShane), The Long Good Friday and the original 1971 Get Carter.
Union representative Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins, "The Long Good Friday," "Mrs Henderson Presents"), who was brought up by a single mother working multiple, low paying jobs, encouraged the plucky Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins, "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Never Let Me Go") to join a meeting with company execs about a possible work stoppage.
It also sports a terrific, Morricone-tinged score by Sergio Pizzorno, which gives a lyrical lift to the brass-tacks British crime movie style (reminiscent of The Long Good Friday or Layer Cake).
He becomes the target of the corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov, brilliantly conjuring up shades of Bob Hoskins in “The Long Good Friday” and current Russian prez Vladimir Putin) in a northwestern Russian province near the Finnish border.
Kolya becomes the target of the corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov, brilliantly conjuring up shades of Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday and current Russian President Vladimir Putin) in a northwestern Russian province, near the Finnish border.
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It's a scene that rivals Bob Hoskins' performance at the end of The Long Good Friday, albeit creating vastly different tones.
Vanished is the vibrantly attractive, crisply energetic star of "Prime Suspect" and "The Long Good Friday."