Like Hamlet, Niels Arden Opley’s first foray into American film is a revenge tragedy. Rising gangster Victor (Colin Farrell) seeks vengeance upon the honcho who had Victor’s wife and little daughter killed, Alphonse (Terrence Howard). Victor infiltrates Alphonse’s gang and bumps off the hood who twigs to his real identity. Meanwhile Victor both watches and is watched by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a mysterious, scarred young woman who lives in the high rise opposite his. She coerces Victor into killing the drunk driver who got off lightly for ruining her face and life.
Like Hamlet, Victor -- whose name is really Laszlo, but whom we’ll still call Victor -- delays killing Alphonse, indeed even saves his life. He wants to set up a situation where can he also off Alphonse’s Albanian gunsels who killed Lazslo’s wife and thought they buried Laszlo too.
In the pre-title scene, Victor’s friend/colleague Darcy (Dominic Cooper) holds his baby and waxes on about the need not to be alone and about the heart’s capacity to heal. This prepares for the film’s major shift from revenge tragedy to hopeful romance. Victor and Beatrice undermine each other’s revenge plan, out of their growing emotional commitment to each other. She prevents his suicidal bombing of Alpohonse and the Albanians. He only hurts the drunk driver she wanted killed. This double softening enables them to leave the underworld and rather ride the underground to love in the last scene. As the pre-title scene prefigures not just the leads' self-healing but Darcy’s decision not to kill Victor and Beatrice, it parallels the dumb show that precedes the play Hamlet commissions to expose Claudius’s guilt.
When the taped little daughter expresses her confidence that “Daddy will handle the monster,” the ironic reference seems to be to Alphonse. But it turns out to be the monster of cold, murderous vengeance in Victor himself. As the film sees vengeance as self-destructive, in the final shoot-out Victor kills a respectable number of gunsels in self-defense, but his two primary targets, Alphonse and the Albanian gang leader, kill each other in one exchange. Alphonse avenges his henchman’s murder and the Albanian his brother’s, so they miss the salvation Victor and Beatrice find in each other when they step out of the vicious circle of revenge. As the plot is driven by the various characters’ drive to avenge, we don’t see any cops in this film. It’s all personal.
Alphonse is dramatically isolated. In his fabulous mansion -- deliciously destroyed in the finale -- there is no sign of anyone living with him. He eats alone, as when he ominously summons Victor to bring him a late-night snack. In contrast, Beatrice’s mother Valentine (Isabelle Huppert) insists on giving Victor her freshly baked cookies and lemon chicken dish (that it turns out Beatrice has been romantically cooking for him instead). Here food is community, connection, an emblem of how Beatrice and Victor will save each other. Midway between Alphonse’s solitude and Valentine’s warm community, Victor gives his Albanian prisoner false hopes by feeding him a granola bar.
Beatrice’s scars are an emblem for the other characters’ damage, Alphonse’s by the dehumanizing success of his criminal “bad eminence,” Victor’s by his single-minded drive to avenge his loss rather than make a new life, Valentine’s deafness. With her cheery, generous spirit Valentine personifies Darcy’s remark that the afflicted can heal themselves. Darcy narrowly averts Alphonse’s fate and preserves his domestic, humane values, when after helping to set up Victor he eschews shooting him. He chooses this relationship over the gang. The apparently redundant title suggests that if a dead man can still be downed, he can still be brought back to life, as the emotionally stunted Victor, Beatrice and finally Darcy forego vengeance to recover their humanity.
When Beatrice and Victor meet across their respective high rises they are defined as detached isolates. The first slow pan across the gap between them pronounces the distance they will have to traverse to connect. If their first connection is over murder plans, their final is for the more fulfilling love. As her name -- and white dress -- evokes Dante’s idealized love, Beatrice saves Victor from infernal vengeance and makes Lazslo a victor beyond his expectations.
Two other contexts are summoned up in the film. The vicious brat gang in Beatrice’s neighborhood suggest a society without innocence, without sympathy, a correlative to both heroes’ vengeful bent. The director and lead Rapace also carry associations from their previous collaboration, the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Though Rapace draws on her persona of strength, will and resourcefulness, this film transcends the earlier value of vengeance to provide a more optimistic, romantic and thereby perhaps more American, resolution. When the film closes on a Hungarian song, it returns Victor to Laszlo, restored to his more honorable engineer and with a new love and life ahead. The dead man is down and the living lover reborn.
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