10 Great Movies With "Rotten" Scores On Rotten Tomatoes

Shane Meadows’ bleak vengeance tale set in rural England has a Rotten score of 57%.

Meadows has never been shy of dwelling on unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things. Racists, rapists, drug and alcohol abusers, and parent-killers, all populate his raw but finely detailed depictions of working class Britain.

In Dead Man’s Shoes, a man with learning difficulties, Anthony (Tony Kebbell), is befriended by the village drug dealers. Then something awful but unspoken happens to him. Later, Anthony’s brother, Richard (Paddy Considine), returns to the village to exact bloody vengeance on the gang. Considine gives an outstanding performance devoid of mercy and full of terrifying rage.

The revenge set-up is nothing new in film, but what makes Dead Man’s Shoes so different is that here payback isn’t cool or sexy or even heroic. It’s a working-class man in a bleak northern village breaking into homes and killing other working-class men with his bare hands.

Meadows, as ever, paints every character as a fully-formed human, including the drug dealers upon whom vengeance is wrought. They are humanised and made sympathetic before being coldly killed, with Richard stalking the village as a gas-mask wearing Grim Reaper. There is a numbing inevitably to each thug’s execution. And just when we think ‘justice’ has been done, Meadows throws a couple of harrowing curveballs at us in the film’s climax.

It’s nasty, seemingly nihilistic stuff. Does vengeance justify Richard’s killing spree? In Dead Man’s Shoes, morality is as grey and sombre as the rural England skies.