As a photographer myself, but don't find the aura of Rankin to be beguiling at all, I was almost hoping that this was a failure, that it was as bad as most reviews make it out to be.
Direction-wise, it is very ordinary, indeed. No 'special eye'; just pointing the camera in the right direction at the right time. But, I like a challenge, I like a difficult movie and I'll give Brit flicks an extra effort, so I watched this with an open mind.
Yes, James Cosmo as gangster Karva is a difficult fella to like and I can't work out if he's being himself or is indeed, acting. Either way, he's either overacting or an extremely overexcited, maybe unstable individual. David Leon, as the Runner at least adds some semblance of decency until the movie descends into Tarantino territory, in a torture scene. Then it goes back into a Cockney 'Shameless' zone, as the wide- eyed 'saint/angel' or whatever "it" is goes from speechless orphan to fortune teller and caster of wishes in a nano-second - and miracle of all miracles, everybody knows this, without the child seemingly having said anything.
Unfortunately, The Lives Of...has the narrative consistency of school- dinner custard as it jumps about like a frog in a blender and basically one's faith in it diminishes as all credibility crashes.
The script wants to be big and clever but isn't, it's just shouty and aggressive. As the religious bits kicked in, I was not relishing the afore-warned appearance of Marc Warren, who is, to my mind a greatly overrated actor, who always manages to rub me up the wrong way. That's a personal thing, of course and shouldn't affect my view of the film itself, but it does.
At this point, during a scene in church, where a man burps and then plugs from a large bottle of vodka, I did a rare thing - and switched it off. A waste of everybody's time, especially mine. I saw it on BBC2
