You Would Do The Same

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2018)

Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell is all I needed to know about this movie before seeing it. The trio only add to an already solid script and bring it to life as the three main characters.
McDormand plays Mildred, an angry, bad-ass mother who won't take shit from anybody, especially when it comes to finding her daughter's killer. Pissed off that after seven months no arrests have been made in the case she decides to take matters into her own hands - in a most unexpected way. Just down the street from her home sits three billboards long since abandoned on the side of a road rarely used after the installation of a new highway nearby. Now, however, construction has re-routed traffic back to this stretch of road, and Mildred scrapes together the billboards' rental fee to post a little message to Ebbing's Chief of Police (welcome back Woody Harrelson). The message: get off your ass and do something (I'm paraphrasing).
Chief Willoughby has his own problems, and tries the sympathy card to reason with Mildred. He wants the billboards gone for the better of the town he claims, even though the law says Mildred is doing nothing wrong. She doesn't want to hear it, and pushes him further into action.
Enter seemingly corrupt mamma's boy cop, Officer Dixon (played brilliantly by Sam Rockwell) who knows a thing or two about how you solve problems in Ebbing. He too, it seems, will stop at nothing to get what he wants. What he wants is to protect his good friend (and the only reason why he still has a job), the Chief.
This easy-to-follow, sometimes darkly-funny movie keeps you interested right from the beginning. This isn't your typical "I know who did it" crime-drama. This could easily be a true story, but it's not. However, the concept of using billboards to push for justice is true and happened more than two decades ago in the deep southern United States, according to director Martin McDonagh. "What kind of pain would lead somebody to do that?" he asked himself at the time.
Now we know, and I would have done the same.