[Locke]

Place Beyond the Pines doesn't work. It opens with just short of an hour of rich characterisation, and a crazy genre mashup that shouldn't work but does. It's great, and I would have been happy if that was the whole movie, but then the protagonist of that story, Luke, dies and the movie just keeps on going...

You would assume that as the movie chose to keep going, it would have a sense of purpose and direction but in reality what you get right smack in the middle of this bloated near two and a half hour movie, is forty minutes of pure filler. The man who killed Luke, Avery, is a cop and although it initially deals with the aftermath of what he did, it soon spirals into a giant tangent, until by the end when his story starts wrapping up we're basically in a completely different, and incredibly less interesting, movie. Cooper is a good actor but his character Avery, lacks pretty much all of the rich complexity of Luke. And still it keeps going...

Once the filler is done, how do we wrap up this bloated mess? Well we basically make the final third Place Beyond the Pines 2 dragging the whole thing out until the only thing you're excited for is finally seeing those damn credits roll. Dreadful.