Filth

Only in Bizarro World could I see two movies called Night Moves and Filth and neither one of them feature a star named Boobsie Collins or Max Pipes. They instead happened to be fairly decent indie films, the latter of which featuring the latest person in Hollywood to finally wake up and decide to start acting. Over the past few years we've seen this happen to Matthew McConaughey and now it appears that James McAvoy is following suit, as he no longer appears to be the scrubby wannabe soccer player that will hit on your girlfriend the second your back is turned! He's gone from being the worst part of The Last King of Scotland to being a major reason for the revival of the X-Men franchise.

In his latest film Filth he plays the role of Bruce; the corrupt and despicable cop who does any and everything he can to get promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. And he does this by manipulating everyone he comes into contact with while also being high on whatever drug is within an arm's reach. His main motivation for pursing this new role is the hope that it will help him win back his sexy and mysterious wife along with their young daughter. The only problem is he is slowly losing his grip on reality as his hallucinations are getting worse and worse and they are starting to happen more frequently as well.

Now they never fully explain what happened between him and his wife, nor do they go into much detail as to what happened to cause these weird visions of his, but they do allude to something that happened between him and a young boy that keeps popping up in his head. And as he continues to have sex with every one of his co workers' wives, along with the dizzying amount of hookers that happen to cross his path, you wonder if there is even an ounce of goodness left in this man. There are glimpses here and there but with each day he grows more and more paranoid thinking that everyone is out to get him, so he continues to deceive his co workers into believing that they are secretly out to get one another. And as he does this, you see both the pressures of his trying to get this promotion and his attempt to solve a case of the brutal killing of a young Japanese student start to take its toll on him.

Now all of this sounds pretty heavy, and it is, but this movie is based off of a book that was written by the same author of Trainspotting; and it has a similar tone and feel to it as that story did. Along with all of these trippy moments comes a ton of dark humor; in particular there is the Christmas party scene where McAvoy uses a game to have sex with one of his co worker's love interest. Let's just say that a Xerox machine was used in a rather clever manner to make this happen. The driving force behind this whole movie is McAvoy's performance; you despise the kind of person that he is but you can see that he is desperately trying his hardest to unearth the good that is buried deep inside of him. And it's because of this that the film actually works.

It was also good to see that Jamie Bell is still putting out solid performances, along with the once little girl from 28 Weeks Later, Imogen Poots.

I rate this movie as FRESH and suggest that you pop in. Of course, if I find out that McAvoy had sex with Poots while on set, I will change my rating to wack.