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‘5lbs of Pressure’ Review: Forgiveness Comes Hard for an Ex-Con in This Unconvincing Crime Drama
Luke Evans stars as an ex-con in "5lbs of Pressure," a crime drama loaded with plot complications but no emotional depth to support itself.
While the ruse works well enough superficially — maybe the industrial U.K. city is even more persuasively “gritty” than NYC these days — it might partly explain why writer-director Phil Allocco ’s crime melodrama, out from Lionsgate in theaters and on demand, feels like it takes place in some semi-mythological movie genreland rather than a palpable, flesh-and-blood community. After a framing tease of mysterious gunfire inside a dive bar opens the film, onscreen text alerts that it’s now “Four Days Earlier.” Adam DeSalvo ( Luke Evans) is approaching the end of three years’ probation following another 16 in prison, convicted for a murder committed during a dumb turf-war flareup between youthful hotheads. That split personality is nicely defined by the frequently rich, stylized lighting effects of DP Sara Deane’s color-noir visual atmospherics, which doesn’t square with a climactic array of unearned sentimentality: forced pleas against gun violence, a teary montage of flashbacks, back-to-back “sensitive” acoustic pop songs.
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