A Most Violent Year (2014)

As aggressive as the title may seem in the start of "A Most Violent Year", as much lack of dynamic we get till the movie ends. I even was in doubt: to watch or not to watch, given the context - 1981, the most violent year in the history of New York City - because I really wasn't in the mood for a realistic exposure of the period. No worries, even this statistic fades out in the film. But that's not the main problem...

The action follows a period of 30 days from the life of Abel Morales, a young entrepreneur in the industry of fossil fuels - we don't get a precise activity domain explicitly, stuff that's quite irritating at least for the first half of the movie, where you need to deduce by yourself what's the exact area of operation for this guy. We start with a transaction for a shore property, where Morales pays and advance with a term of a month to complete the sum. Also in the start we see a fuel truck hijacked, the driver beaten and left lying on the highway, finally being visited and encouraged by Morales in the hospital. Like that we get to find out that he's the owner of a truck fleet that got to be a target for such attacks. On top of everything we have a prosecutor interested in a career advancement, intending to place charges on the company on multiple counts, not clear for a while which all these might me, or why there are so many. This wouldn't matter much, but in the context of an investigation that looks more fit for a drug lord, and not for a small business, the motivation should probably be made more explicit quicker. The conclusion is that Abel's request for a loan to complete the transaction we started from is rejected by his bank, which brings him close to bankruptcy. Somehow contradictory with moving into a new villa. In any case, he's forced to look for an alternate money source... and that's pretty much the subject that the movie offers in its second part, after we manage to untangle a bit the whole context...

I'm sorry but I'm not within the same page with J.C. Chandor, who got praise for both this movie as for others like "Margin Call" in regard to screenplay and direction. For me it looks like a contradictory "performance" - the narrative tires you with a bunch of gaps that either you must fill in or to keep in mind and wait for an explanation to come out, while at the same time it bores you with a slow pace, which if you look over the story is not actually there! I mean, we have action, but somehow from what's on paper to the screen it mysteriously fades away and we're left with a general slowness garnished with a pretentious unjustified feel of middle-class social analysis. I don't know where's the precise issue, maybe it's about how all this is staged, but except the acting I find it to be way below the critics appreciation it received.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5