SMACKDOWN Hardy lets out his rage.

There’s a difference between tapping into the mind-set of a hardened criminal and simply reveling in his macho posturing; the head-pounding Bronson chooses the latter strategy and never looks back. Nodding to A Clockwork Orange, Refn flips through a designer catalog of bombast—baroque lighting, shock cuts, to-camera address, animation—to tell the story of Michael Petersen (an imposing but one-note Hardy), an infamous British convict with a sociopathic interest in fomenting prison mischief. His single-mindedness is mirrored by Refn’s: Some have mistaken the lack of catharsis for integrity, but there’s something incredibly smug about the movie’s ambition to assault an audience.

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