Five BAFTAs, several nods to the Oscars, this surely can’t be a bad film and it isn’t but unlike other award-winners in the past, it isn’t a glorious one either. Three Billboards is an angst-ridden, venom-spitting movie mostly full of ugly characters and coldness in the face of vulgar dialogue. Nobody likes anybody else and the film builds up over these cross-references of hate and conflict to ultimately bring a passive enjoyment.
The central idea of a murder going uninvestigated isn’t really what the film is about and that is its problem. I come from an Inspector Morse school of drama and the sideshow of malpractice within the bigoted police law enforcement only gropes at the attention like a scratch to the face.
For all the experts this was probably the film they had waited for. Why? Well, it harnesses the terrible injustices of brutality and hatred with an attempt to show that kindness lives in all of us, rather like a diet. For me, it was just meat and two veg.
Hardly one I shall even watch when it appears on Channel 4 in five years time.
Les Rowley's world 