For all Dead Man's Shoes' well-paced, well-observed boondocks melodrama, its premise seems simultaneously slender and overheated.
80
Film Threat
Film Threat
An original, complex, and utterly gruesome revenge parable, and never portrays its characters as black and white. Considine handles his performance like a pro, and only adds to the pure skill behind it.
75
New York Daily NewsJami Bernard
New York Daily NewsJami Bernard
This is no simplistic vigilante movie. Like Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance" trilogy, it explores the nature of the beast of revenge, leaving the audience in a sweat of dread.
Film plays as a quirky Brit riff on everything from U.S. slasher pics to revenge oaters but without Meadows' usual psychological complexity.
40
Village Voice
Village Voice
Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.