Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) Cult Brit Revenge Fantasy Returns (Review)

Dead Man’s Shoes is a 2004 film from This is England and The Gallows Pole director Shane Meadows that stars Paddy Considine, Toby Kebbell, and former British middleweight boxing champion Gary Stretch. It tells the story of parachute regiment veteran, Richard (Considine), who returns to the semi-rural/semi-urban Midlands town he grew up in to exact revenge on local drug dealer Sonny (Stretch), and his acolytes who have each taken advantage of Richard’s learning disabled kid brother Anthony (Kebbell).

The film quickly earned itself the tag of cult classic – a status which has only grown throughout the years via word of mouth, with each Film4 screening, or with the arrival of a new Meadows project sending new audiences to his previous work. Almost twenty years after its original release, Dead Man’s Shoes is, much like its protagonist Richard, set to return to cinemas. Screenings will take place nationwide, with some from 35mm prints running from mid-September, while BFI Southbank will screen it as part of their ‘Acting Hard’ season on the 12th September, and with Shane Meadows will be in attendance for an accompanying Q & A session.

Dead Man’s Shoes came at an interesting time for Meadows as it was a back-to-basics approach that followed the misfire of his previous film, 2002’s Once Upon a Time in the Midlands – a studio picture with a bigger budget and an A list cast that proved to be outside the auteur’s comfort zone. Once Upon a Time was a light and frivolous comic movie that many conisdered a step backwards from 1999’s A Room for Romeo Brass, whose glorious comic touches were offset by some genuinely disturbing moments. The irony is that both were delivered by their lead actor and Meadow’s lifelong friend Paddy Considine, and Dead Man’s Shoes didn’t just reunite star and director (they collaborated on the screenplay together too), it saw them openly pursue the darkness of their previous effort with an unflinching abandon. Though Meadows has toyed with the darkness in subsequent projects (most notably the racial violence and sexual abuse of the This is England film, its subsequent spin-off TV series, and the 2019 TV drama The Virtues), he hasn’t allowed it to totally consume his vision in the way that he did with Dead Man’s Shoes.

In his 1971 Observer review of Mike Hodges’ acclaimed British revenge noir Get Carter (a film that Dead Man’s Shoes shares many similarities with), George Melly said that it was “like a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast. It’s intoxicating all right, but it’ll do you no good”. Well for my money, Dead Man’s Shoes is like a bottle of neat gin and a bad acid trip before breakfast as the influences behind it seem to be both Mike Hodges seminal classic, and The Hired Hand – Peter Fonda’s acid western from that same year. Mix those two films together and you still don’t really get a fair idea of Dead Man’s Shoes, mainly because you also need to add an element of horror that is so sh*ttifying, it makes most fright films seem relatively tame. To try and explain it further means I will have to incorporate several spoilers into my review, so if you haven’t seen Dead Man’s Shoes before then stop reading now.

Just like Michael Caine’s London based gangster in Get Carter, Considine’s Richard heads out on a path of brutal, bloody revenge in the wake of his brother’s death. That crucial piece of information, that motive, isn’t immediately apparant however as the character of Anthony, the kid brother, features throughout the movie. It’s only at a crucial point in the narrative that we realise that Anthony is dead, and that Richard alone has been haunted by his vision.

On the surface, exacting vengeance on a gang of low-life drug dealers who’ve made a young man with learning disabilities their plaything and victim is one that people can understand, and even though they may not condone such actions, they can empathise with them at least. What Meadows does that’s really clever is share a further intrinsic link to Hodges’ movie because, in reality, Richard’s motivation isn’t really brotherly or selfless at all. It can be seen as vengeance borne out of a personal affront in that alpha-male Richard’s primary egocentric thought is ‘how dare they do that to my brother’. This is further underlined by the rather derogatory and offensive opinion that he himself shares about his brother’s challenges with one of his prey, and it ultimately calls into question just how selfless Richard could ever be, given that he left all his responsibilities behind without a second thought for a life in the army.

With his fuzzy shorn head, beard, and green-surplus jacket (to say nothing of that chill-inducing gasmask), Paddy Considine cuts an iconic figure in 21st century British cinema as the relentless avenging angel of Dead Man’s Shoes, and undoubtedly this is one of the best performances (if not the best), of his career. It’s therefore unsurprising to learn that he co-wrote the screenplay with his childhood friend Meadows, reminiscing about the times when they’d re-enact the original Rambo movie – Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 film First Blood – in the lush, green Nottinghamshire countryside.

As great as that central performance is, Dead Man’s Shoes does, like many films from Meadows, boast an incredible supporting cast that deliver compellingly authentic performances. The aforementioned Gary Stretch – a son of St Helens just like this reviewer (in fact, his mother used to clean for my boujie uncle and his wife in the ’80s!), shows that rare gift of a sportsman who can genuinely act. Meanwhile, Toby Kebbell delivers the performance here that caused people to sit up and ensure his path to many a Hollywood tentpole blockbuster. There’s also some great work from Meadows’ own rep company of actors such as Stuart Wolfenden, Neil Bell, Seamus O’Neill, George Newton and Jo Hartley – the latter two later figure largely in Meadows’ This is England series.

It is authenticity that is key to Meadows’ work, be it in the improvised nature of the performance or the grounded reality he sets his stories within. Dead Man’s Shoes is a revenge fantasy that calls to mind all sorts of similar movies, many of whom I’ve already referenced, but unlike a lot of those films Meadows never lets the specificity of his tale slip. These are real locations and these, for better or worse (mainly worse), are real people, and it’s this sense of social realism with an almost documentary air that ensures Dead Man’s Shoes gets under your skin. Best of all, it does this in ways that any number of movies featuring granite-faced Hollywood mega stars dispatching countless scummy reprobates with a hail of bullets and a snarky quip, simply never could.

Mark’s Archive: Dead Man’s Shoes