Nicolas Winding Refn’s handheld camerawork has lost none of its anxious bite in the years since 1996’s Pusher, as With Blood on My Hands proves a bleaker, more assured follow-up that switches its focus from Frank to his dim-witted pal Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen). Having apparently survived Frank’s beating, Tonny is released from prison and goes looking for work from his kingpin father The Duke (Leif Sylvester Petersen), only to be treated like a pitiful disappointment and burden. Paternal acceptance and validation are the driving motivation behind Tonny’s efforts to pay back his numerous debts, and they’re compounded by the revelation that Tonny apparently fathered a child with a cruel ex (Anne Sorensen) who expects him to fork over child support (not to mention some extra cash for coke). Everyone snorts everything in sight, a drug haze that Refn – when not expressing Tonny’s need for admiration via Dardennes-style shots from behind his bald head, which is tattooed with “RESPECT” – conveys through roaming cinematography and intermittent blasts of heavy metal and fractured industrial noise. That narcotized unreality, in which Tonny is repeatedly confronted by the falsity of his own high self-image, eventually culminates at an orgiastic wedding where strippers entertain the guests and – per the franchise’s template – the complications from a drug-deal-gone-awry come to a blistering head. From Tonny’s initial, pathetically funny impotence in the company of two prostitutes, to his final, desperate attempt to liberate himself from his squalid present and in-all-likelihood squalid future, Pusher II doesn’t so much carve out new ground as merely provide jolt after electric jolt from its portrait of criminality as a corruption of the mind, body and spirit.
Comments