DIRECTOR Ryûhei Kitamura WRITER David Cohen STARS Luke Evans; Gary Grubbs; Adelaide Clemens
Japanese director Ryûhei Kitamura’s second US venture is a riot; revelling in its throwaway nonsense, it’s fun from the get-go, and knows it, too, as a classic — well, perhaps not — cautionary tale of how one should not mess with the wrong person. The wrong person in this instance is a sociopath with a penchant for kidnapping young women, and Luke Evans is strangely charismatic as the one-line-spouting antihero without a name, charging the screen as he takes out one redneck after another in increasingly gory fashion.
Up close, the story does not hold up to inspection, of course it doesn’t, and to care a jot would be to miss the raison d’être of a film of this ilk; No One Lives is pure comic strip.
