by Ross Hunter
Playing the ‘tough guy’ might not seem like the biggest challenge for an actor. And, should the writing be infantile enough, it isn’t. Jason Statham (Transporter) rightfully receives great acclaim for his roles in Guy Ritchie’s best films – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) – yet that doesn’t expunge him from the fact that the great majority of his films involve him playing a character who turns up, grunts incomprehensibly then punches forty people in the face. Exciting, maybe. But it’s not exactly great character acting.
Enter Matthias Schoenaerts, (The Drop) a Belgian actor who seems to be appearing in almost everything lately. His latest, Disorder (2016), sees him playing a stereotypical tough guy – an ex-soldier named Vincent in-charge of protecting the wife and child from a rich Lebanese businessman. However, from the very first scene the viewer is made aware that lurking behind Vincent’s tough exterior is an emotional fragility that he struggles, valiantly, to keep hidden. As he runs with his fellow soldiers down a muddied track in the rain the unnerving, tinnitus-like sound of Vincent’s trauma makes itself known. Mike Lévy’s score consistently reminds us of Vincent’s struggles with paranoia, fear and, as the title suggests, emotional disorder. We never learn of what happened to Vincent when he was a soldier, only that it was of sufficient extremity to cause a reliance on self-medication and a need to assert control in a situation that quickly proves to be uncontrollable.
Framed against the back drop of the true-to-life political mayhem of Syria, and of the men making money from such conflicts, Disorder focuses on the incomprehensibility of both geopolitical relations and the emotions elicited in the people caught up in them – such as the traumatised soldier and wilfully ignorant wife played wonderfully by Diane Kruger. While I don’t think that this film has anything of particular value to say about the present conflicts in the Middle-East and the West’s involvement in them (other than the fact that it is an absolute mess) it makes for a pretty thrilling hour and a half. Vincent’s paranoia is expertly displayed and his explosion of violence near the films conclusion seems at once therapeutic and utterly heartbreaking – as if he has given in to the beast he so desperately tries to control. Schoenaerts plays a tough guy with both physical temerity and emotional nuance, which, as the latest James Bond films prove, is no easy task. In a month where Hollywood might encourage you to go see Batman Vs Superman, this film deserves much more attention.
[imdb id=tt4085084]