As good as Lawless looks in the trailers, it lacks on the big screen.

Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf and Jason Clarke star in Lawless as the Bondurant brothers who run a gang of bootleggers in Virginia.

Set in the Depression, the brothers come up against a new deputy (Guy Pierce) who threatens to destroy their operations with corrupted ways.

The film could be a great movie. The storyline is good, being based on a true story, and the actors are on par, yet something is missing.

The writing is not the best. The dialogue is dull and hard to understand because of accents. Only a few chuckles can be mustered, just a lot of men standing around talking. For the first 30 minutes, not much takes place. The actors squabble a tad, but overall the plots of the characters do not pick up until the middle of the movie.

Since the film is a story from Hollywood, the phrase “based on a true story” can be very broad in the sense of inspiration. Refreshingly, Lawless is adapted from Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World. Bondurant is a grandson of one of the brothers and wrote his novel from family stories, news clippings, archival records and court transcripts.

Lawless may not be motion picture of the year, but it is a story at least worth telling
-Kelli Henderson