IF HE HAD A HAMMER....HE'D HAMMER IN THE MORNING......BQ NAILS DOWN "YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE"

You Were Never Really Here (2017)     We weren't the biggest of fans of the Jonathan Ames novella this movie's based on.....

                 To us, it came off like a clever stunt........a book that reads like it's gathering up a head of steam to become a full length novel, then bluntly stops short.

                 Ha ha.....very creative.  Where's the rest of it?

                 Director Lynn Ramsay grabbed hold of this literally half-baked story and made it her own.

                  She not only gave the movie an ending (or at least as much of an ending as you could expect), she re-shaped the material into a strikingly visual/aural experience, using Joaquin Phoenix's deeply internalized performance as the film's centerpiece........

                  We don't know exactly how to describe this.......the film plays like "Taxi Driver" if it had been directed by Stanley Kubrick in his "2001" austere, dry emotionless mode........(even when Phoenix is driven to display raw emotion, Ramsay carefully stages and edits everything with a cold, hard, unforgiving eye.)

                   The film freely borrows the setups from "Taxi Driver" and "The Professional".....(abused child rescued from her scummy tormentors by a tortured man whose ultra-violent nature makes him a formidable Knight in shining armor......more than equal to the task of decimating legions of creeps..)

                    Naturally, this guy is a severely damaged soul, a walking open wound, barely containing a lifetime of pent up fury and barely keeping himself from suicide.

                   Combined with Ramsay's calibrated visual poetry, Phoenix embodies the silent agony of a man who's known nothing but unspeakable abuse, horror and violence since his childhood.  He's scary, he's pathetic, he's heartbreaking.........sometimes, all at once.  A flat out brilliant performance.

                    Wielding a hardware store hammer, he's both avenging angel and implacable killer.....specializing in saving children who've fallen into the hands of sex traffickers.....

                 But don't for one minute think this is another take on "Taxi Driver" or "The Equalizer"......Ramsey and Phoenix have no interest in satisfying audience bloodlust with action-movie whoop-whoops.

                  Despite its body count and flowing blood, ultimately it's a quiet, eerily stationary meditative piece.   Yes, you need a degree of patience to watch it........so anyone living on a gluten-heavy diet of Dwayne Johnson movies shouldn't go anywhere near it.

                  We did go near it.....and don't regret it. A strange, challenging little movie, guaranteed to stay with you.  BQ hammers out 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)  (Oh and as long we mentioned the book, 2 stars for the novella...(**) unlike the movie, it's strictly one third of a meal.....