If sadistic, dehumanizing films are to your taste, you'll love this.

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2018)

It takes a bizarre mindset to be the writer/director of such a sadistic, dehumanizing film, as MDonagh fails in this Cohen Brothers wannabe quest. Of course, 'No Country For Old Men' contained exceptionally macabre violence, but its major perpetrators were hardened criminals, bent police and an arch villain who was akin to those found in a Batman comic.
However, 'Three Billboards' depicts supposedly average middle class characters (albiet very neurotic, racist, abusive etc.) relentlessly perpetratrating vigilante acts of criminal violence. The most sadistic scene is not when Sam Rockwell's character pummeled and hurled an innocent man through a 2nd story office window and then punched a screaming secretary in the face with no mention of charges ever having been raised for these crimes. Nor is it when Frances McDormand's character threw Molotov cocktails into the police station and is provided with a false alibi by a man she subsequently will treat like dirt just for wanting a dinner date with her.
Rather, the most egregious dumbass violence is perpetrated after a school kid hit Frances McDormand's car window with a bottle while at the school's entrance, so McDormand proceeds to viciously kick a silent boy and girl in the crotch. This unnecessary glorification of vigilante overreaction is apparently never even reported. I'd imagine that most folks reading this review would at least be anticipating an investigation.
Alas, McDormand's and Rockwell's Oscar-winning performances makes it too easy for the writer/director to get away with blatant cheatings of the audience such as these. The "violence begets violence" admonition is mocked by having these words spoken by a diabolical wife beating sadist and his callow young girlfriend who had recently read it on a bookmark.
In future decades 'Three Billboards' will be placed in the same genre as 'The Birth of a Nation', the 1915 masterpiece of writer/director D. W. Griffith which glorified the Klu Klux Klan and served as a "justification" for continued disenfranchisement and mob killings of African Americans for two more generations.
That 'Three Billboards' is cleverly sardonic does not make its "auteur" director McDonagh a jot less culpable of exploitating dehumanizing vigilante crimes to boost his fame and fortune.