Filth

This is an hour and a half of your life you will never get back--don't do it! McAvoy is a terrific actor; why he wasted his talent on this piece of shite is beyond me. How anyone can call it comedy is beyond me. How anyone can call it entertainment is beyond me. Sick, sad, and pathetic are the descriptors that come to mind. I have a good ear for languages and accents, and I lived in the U.K. for years, so a Scottish brogue is not unfamiliar to me. But the spoken words in this movie are sometimes unintelligible. Not that you miss any great dialogue, mind you! Based on the cast I decided to slog through it, ever hopeful it would have some redeeming aspect. Nope. Forget it. You'll be as sorry as this movie is.

Magandang pelikula!

Magandang pelikula!

Magandang pelikula!

Magandang pelikula!

source: Filth

Filth, the novel, was exciting and experimental, but because there are so many extremes in it, it is very difficult to sanitise it for a movie going audience. How do you make a talking tapeworm work on film? It is a character in the book. Very difficult. Compromises had to be made and some of the racism, sexism, homophobia etc etc had to be toned down if not cut out completely. I watched the film at a local (noisy) theatre. The performances were decent and the film was passable as pale reflection of the book, but I felt there were many edited cuts in the film which were bizarre. At one point David Soul (starring as a taxi driver) started singing his big pop hit from the 70's "Silver Lady". Jim Broadbent as Dr Rossi popped in and out of the film without much explanation of why he and Bruce "Robbo" Robertson were having these one to one sessions. Inspector Bob Toal is trying to write a book but it doesn't tie up with the rest of the film. Luckily I have read the book before and know the story well, but if I hadn't, I think I would be a bit confused. Stealing the show for me, is John Sessions as Chief Inspector Toal. He captures the character of the book as a traditional white police officer out of date in a modern world.

McAvoy was brilliant, you have to give him that. He played that twisted man brilliantly. As for the rest of the movie? What the hell is it about? The endless fall of a twisted mind? Endless fall of the twisted society? Saw no point in the movie or in the plot. If the point was to point out to a humanity in crisis... well, thank you, but we all knew that one already. Only thing funny, maybe, is to see how the coppers in Scotland are doing it, only, of course, bloated and exaggerated to the point of a pure comedy as seen in the beginning of the movie. All in all, I could have wasted my time a bit better.

Irvine Welsh hates Scotland and he convinced me never to set foot in his wretched country. As in Transpotting, the main character of the movie (based on Welsh's novel) is a Scottish paranoid drug addict, only this time he happens to be a policeman. Bruce is corrupted, depraved and ready to sink extremely low to get promoted. The rest of the crew he is competing against is not much better, so right from the start my question was "Why should I care?" Then came a massive dose of deja-vu: a repetition of most of the gags seen in Transpotting, only filthier. But the kiss of death is the total lack of dark humour. The only feature that can make this sort of product bearable is some fun, but this movie is totally unfunny and way OTT with its attempts to outdo the most outrageous scenes seen on screen until now.

FILTH is the perfect title for this filthy, bottom-of-the-barrel Scottish comedy that comes to us courtesy of the novel by TRAINSPOTTING writer Irvine Welsh. I should make it clear that I consider TRAINSPOTTING to be one of the most overrated films of the 1990s so I had little hopes of enjoying this similarly depraved film either. And I was right: FILTH is everything I hate about modern so-called 'comedies'. It's a film that goes out of its way to offend everyone, with below the belt gags taking in all manner of outrageous situations and depravities. I honestly don't find the material here to be funny in the slightest, but it doesn't surprise me that others crack up at this sort of stuff; I have a very old-fashioned sense of humour. The film is also flawed in presenting us with a protagonist who is so irredeemably corrupt that there's no way he can come back from it, so attempts to make him sympathetic to the viewer just don't work. James McAvoy's character wants stringing up, not praising. The only positive thing I can find about the whole experience is that McAvoy's incredibly dedicated performance is out of this world, and I can only wish he had been employed in a better movie. He's be a perfect fit for Macbeth, for example.