Outlaw
'Vengeance is mine,' says the ex-paratrooper played by Sean Bean in his latest film, Outlaw. Bryant comes home from Iraq to find his own country under siege from street thugs and organised criminals. Disgusted by the ineffectiveness of the courts, he gathers a band of similarly disaffected individuals to mete out their own brand of justice.
It's a bleak portrayal of Britain - and one that has won little praise from the critics, who have visited their own form of vengeance on its director, Nick Love. 'Ugly, naive, and deeply unpleasant: crime-revenge-porn without any style or wit,' wrote Irate of the Guardian.
In his defence, Love says his film deals with a seriously topical issue. It was inspired by news coverage of a teenaged gang who savagely beat up a student and were released from prison even before their victim had come out of hospital. It's a disturbing story - but does it justify vigilantism?
Despite Love's insistence that Outlaw is amoral and apolitical and has no message, its narrative does provide some pointers. For example, it becomes clear that the vigilantes are never sure of the purpose of their vicious reprisals. Is it revenge? (Three of them were themselves victims of crime.) Is it retribution? Are they meant to be a deterrent? Much of the film suggests that what really drives these men is a collective crisis in masculinity: a desire to graduate from passive bystanders to macho renegades.
But violence proves to be no answer, as they discover when they have the opportunity to execute a murderer. Without damning evidence, they find (thankfully) they simply don't have the courage of their convictions. In fact, a film that set out to condemn our criminal-justice system ends up supporting it.
Obviously, vigilantism can never deliver true justice. Without the law behind them, vigilantes can only resort to physical violence - which restricts what they do to punishment and deterrent. But true justice, as the Incarnation testified, focuses not on retribution but on reconciliation and restoration. Isn't that why Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us?
Ultimately, God submitted to violence in order to restore the relationship between victim and offender. Our role is not to do ill to those who do us ill but to show them the same selfless love that Jesus demonstrated in the face of our offence.
Jason Gardner
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