I’ve resigned myself to simply not digging any of the promotional material from John Hillcoat’s Lawless, and taking it on faith and a bit of Cannes buzz that this will be much better than The Weinsteins would like me to believe. A new batch of character posters are certainly no help, as their generic composition and Sin City design don’t promise any better of a movie than the dusty yellow trailer.

Nope, it’s still the things that matter — actors, filmmakers, story — that make me want to see the film so much, not the packaging.

If you’d like to see something more substantial from the movie, we do have two very short clips above and below, which essentially fill out key shots/moments from the trailer. They reinforce what I could already tell- Guy Pearce is clearly a pure force of awesome in this film, and Tom Hardy is giving a great performance from behind the curtains of an accent that I’m giong to have a very tough time buying.

Essentially, this film just needs to get its ass out of France and over here to the states. Alas, that’s still several months away as this thing hits the US in August, joining this year’s landscape of high-profile gangster movies that also includes Killing Them Softly and Gangster Squad.

LAWLESS is the true story of the infamous Bondurant Brothers: bootlegging siblings who made a run for the American Dream in Prohibition-era Virginia. In this epic gangster tale, inspired by true-life tales of author Matt Bondurant’s family in his novel “The Wettest County in the World”, the loyalty of three brothers is put to the test against the backdrop of the nation’s most notorious crime wave.