Cannes 2012 Review: John Hillcoat’s Badass Prohibiton Film ‘Lawless’

I thought I couldn’t like Tom Hardy any more than I already do (and I haven’t even see The Dark Knight Rises yet), but this film takes him to even greater heights. Today was the Cannes Film Festival premiere of John Hillcoat’s Lawless, an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s The Wettest County in the World, about the Bondurant brothers living in Virginia during the prohibition era in the 1930s. Bootleggers extraordinaire, the film follows the three of them and their “immortal”, “invincible” ways as they fight to survive against the ATU (Alcohol Tax Unit) and police. It’s bloody, it’s brutal, it’s badass, and the big cast all around impresses. Lawless is indeed about lawless individuals, putting the lawbreakers at the forefront as the protagonists, and the police as the bad guys, but that’s the only way to do it with a story about the prohibition time. Corrupt cops and politicians who didn’t …