Powerful film, blinkered vision (shared by reviewers)

Rating: 6/10 (24 March 2018)

Reviews of this powerful, strongly-acted but partly blind film divide along predictable political lines. Many point out that the escalating violence of the bitter bereaved mother and the racist junior cop are writer-director-producer McDonagh's preferred style and are as unlikely as the relative saintliness of the "billboarded" police chief and other characters. These commenters deny U.S. society's racism, police brutality, homophobia, sexism and hostility to outsiders that the film reflects.
On the other hand, liberal reviewers applaud both its accurate echo of our daily headlines and its fairytale image of "common humanity" ending hate (despite all history to the contrary). The extreme social pathology of the U.S. has a material source: a rapacious, violent, world-striding system cloaked in hypocrisy. Only some awareness of this reality could ground a more believable narrative of characters driven to extremes.
R. Freed