Hard Times

Hard times offers excitement that makes you feel good; Walter Hill respects the loner myth.

The production has a very handsome mid-1930s New Orleans period flavour but the cast can't lick the script.

A powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.

[Charles Bronson] has the inestimable advantage of looking properly mean. But when he walks out of the film at the end, he leaves a blank-faced parable to it than Kubrick's mental tour of the galleries, [Barry Lyndon]. Is that all there is?

Bronson is fine, Coburn is great as a promoter while Jill Ireland is touching as a lonely woman.

As hard as the hits land every time, it’s the capitalist exchanging of cash and leveling up of wagers on these beaten men’s ability to sock each other out that knocks you down the hardest.

So often a monolithic actor in mediocre films, Bronson’s beady-eyed smirk in this context acquires a droll dignity suggesting graduation from the school of million hard knocks, and every supporting role is colorfully filled.

[T]here's much to admire here, especially the fine combination of cinematographer Philip Lathrop's images and Roger Spottiswoode's editing of the exciting fight sequences.

HARD TIMES is still an enjoyable film, and the depression-era settings are painstakingly captured.

Evocatively atmospheric.