Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine’s TYRANNOSAUR is a slog, an actor’s directorial debut that tells a simplistic story, but, because of the “gravity” of a debut, is overwrought and repetitive, every scene re-establishing the “thesis” in a scholarly but not very fun manner. Other than the title, which takes a brief and not very interesting story into exaggerated account, the film is one-note. It tells of the pathetic life of Joseph (Peter Mullen) who’s just been laid off and spends his days drinking and calling everyone a cunt. In fact he swears and curses so much that he loses his shock value. He gets in bar fights, and he yells at everyone, showing them their worst values. However, he runs into Hannah (Olivia Coleman), who runs a religious charity store although there’s not a fucking vestige of anything religious in her except that we’re supposed to believe that she is. Joseph thinks she’s a fool (she is…) and the two develop a rapport despite incessant fighting. Every scene Joseph proves he’s just the kind of mean guy we knew him to be, and every time Olivia talks she proves herself to be a ditz. Later though, it is revealed that Hannah is a battered wife, although things escalate quickly and suddenly as if they’d never happened before despite the fact that we’re supposed to believe this is a regular occurrence. But the one-note story is stretched right into the one-note lighting. TYRANNOSAUR is one big nothing, an obvious and weirdly dramatized bore.

★/5