'Dead Shot' (2023) Movie Review: An Intense Seventies Thriller

Dead Shot is a film directed by Charles and Thomas Guard. It stars Colin Morgan and Aml Ameen and features the always grateful presence of Mark Strong.

A film that takes itself quite seriously in a revenge romp with political undertones in Ireland.

Storyline

In the 1970s, a member of the IRA takes over an Active Service Unit in London after his wife is accidentally shot dead in Ireland. The unit’s mission is to cause chaos and destruction, while his personal aim is to hunt down his wife’s killer — an SAS captain, who is also hunting him.

Movie Review

A good opportunity to revisit the thriller genre with a well-constructed cinematic flavor and with intention, characters and a whole story to tell. It has a lot of style thanks to the setting and the climate of instability in which the plot is framed.

Dead Shot knows how to swim between revenge thriller and historical narrative in a natural way, configuring a solid and stylish script, with ambition in terms of the treatment of the characters, evolution and a solid execution in the sequences.

It knows how to take its time without speeding up but keeping the right pace at the right moments. It knows how to interest regarding the main characters and the double game of hunter-prey and play both sides equally.

It knows how to get into and avoid at the same time the political issues, focusing more on the characters and their story than on the social tensions, which are there shaping the story, but without breaking the plot that has to be told. They are there setting the atmosphere but without interfering in the development of the thriller.

We liked the tenor and the execution, the characters, and the ability to read a story and find the right tone to tell it.

A matter of choice: here they get it right.

Our Opinion

Taking themselves seriously, the Guard brothers achieve a classic film with many connotations that avoids going into the social conflict to focus on what matters to us: the characters.