10 Trailers That Completely Mis-Sold The Movie

6. Lawless

The period drama has been always been injected with an air of stuffiness. Any film set pre-World War II is automatically going to have the expectations of being to some degree high brow because, well, it€™s old (an idiotic assumption). Prohibition bootlegging tale Lawless is far from this, being an incredibly entertaining, refreshingly violent movie that, while touching on the nature of legends and how their subjects are a lot more fallible than even they themselves believe, it doesn't let its period setting drag it into being anything other than fun. Everything in the trailer, from the presence of The Weinstein Company logo to the slow build nature of it all paints the picture of a much more serious film. But that is just the tip of the iceberg that is the misleading Lawless trailer. Anyone who has seen the film will tell you that Gary Oldman appears for literally two scenes or that the eldest Bondurant plays a much larger role than his marginalised one in the trailer. But one key point that has to be raised is the way the trailer hides Lawless€™ sadistically dark violent streak. One early sequence involving Guy Pearce and Shia LaBeouf was one of the most unexpected and shocking moments of the year, solely due to the way the trailer misrepresented the tone. The trailer so clearly mis-represented the movie that halfway through watching it, a friend turned to me shocked at just how different it was to how the adverts had led them to think it was, but in this case it worked to improve the film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zl7S1LaPMU