Five years after Cass, Jon S. Baird comes up with his second feature film for the big screen, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel "Filth". This was truly one shocking movie. It's about a rogue cop on his way to promotion and how his mental illness actually result in demotion, which turns out as the final nail in his coffin. Sometimes, its most extreme moments worked actually pretty well to develop the main character and the story, but sometimes it also added nothing and felt really only included for nothing but shock value. The one scene that comes to mind particularly is when the main character catches an underage girl in sexual activity with a grown man and threatens that he'll tell her (very influential) father unless she gives him a blowjob. So yeah, you get the full program here: vomiting, sex, drugs, violence, murder... However, the suffering of McAvoy's character is occasionally also depicted in a more subtle manner (e.g. when we find out why he became what he is, his previous and possibly next family are referenced or during his video message to his friend near the end) and that's where the film is usually is at its best. Above that, you could certainly make a point that his homophobic, racist and misogynist comments are not really what he is like, but truly more a symptom of being hit metaphorically in the face one time too many.
All in all, it's 90 fairly entertaining minutes, but definitely not for the easily offended and I'd like to put special emphasis on Jim Broadbent's hilariously ludicrous portrayal of an insane psychiatrist, which may have been the highlight of the whole thing. The animal effects are completely insane as well and almost shocked me as if in a horror movie when they appeared totally up out of nowhere. The film is nowhere near my favorite works of 2013, but if you liked Keitel's or Cage's "Bad Lieutenant" or the more recent "Sightseers", this may be exactly your cup of tea and it's probably even one step up in crassness.
All in all, it's 90 fairly entertaining minutes, but definitely not for the easily offended and I'd like to put special emphasis on Jim Broadbent's hilariously ludicrous portrayal of an insane psychiatrist, which may have been the highlight of the whole thing. The animal effects are completely insane as well and almost shocked me as if in a horror movie when they appeared totally up out of nowhere. The film is nowhere near my favorite works of 2013, but if you liked Keitel's or Cage's "Bad Lieutenant" or the more recent "Sightseers", this may be exactly your cup of tea and it's probably even one step up in crassness.