Bull (2021)

Warning: there really will be spoilers this time around!

A rather angry gentleman named Bull (Neil Maskell) kills his way through the underlings of gangster Norm (David Hayman) in a brutal and somewhat gratuitous manner, certainly not leaving their family business out of the business of dying. Before he kills he asks for the whereabouts of his son Aidan.

Flashbacks slowly reveal that ten years ago, Bull was working for Norm, but marrying your boss’s daughter can have dire repercussions when the marriage goes to shit. Custody battles can turn even uglier than those among civilised people and end even worse.

So much so that a trail of dead bodies years later can be their consequence.

I know very little about the surprising number of direct to streaming (and so on) action and gangster movies that are being churned out by various low budget filmmakers in the UK for at least a decade or so now. But I am well able to identify Paul Andrew Williams’s Bull as the kind of answer/climax movie that takes all of a genre’s tropes, joys and problems and turns them into something monolithic and forceful in what’s not so much a critique as the platonic ideal of its form.

So Williams’s film is nasty in its depiction of violence, often shockingly so, treating vengeance as the undignified and cruel business it is in a manner that goes from the grimly cruel to the disquieting by simply thinking the brutality through to its end. Bull – a guy with an action movie name if ever there was one – is not just the blunt object his name suggests but turns out to be something darker than just a man on a vengeance trip in a late turn towards the explicitly supernatural. And not in sweet baby Jesus Pale Rider way – this is High Plains Drifter territory, but nastier.

Williams’s direction is based on a kind of kitchen sink hyperrealism that regularly drifts in the direction of the feverish and the surreal, using the ugliest bits of the reality of Britain and turning them into thin places. There’s certainly a sense of flow and rhythm to the filmmaking here, but one that often takes stops and starts that very consciously break up the very satisfying structures of the vengeance movie, thereby mirroring and emphasising Bull’s brokenness.

Maskell’s performance is fantastic – the subtle differences he shows between the already horrible but also human Bull of the flashbacks and the horrifying machine of violence and resentment that borders on a more talkative slasher movie killer he turns into are as believable and effective as are his handful of emotional freak-out scenes in the Nic Cage manner. Thanks to this, the difference between what the character was and what he becomes carries an air of genuine sadness. Not because Bull ever was a good man, but because he was the kind of man who could have been good and now is something irredeemable.

And yes, the religious undertones are certainly there on purpose, as the final reveal makes perhaps a bit too clear.