Good Guy

A criminal wants to tell us that really he’s a good guy, that he’s just a victim of circumstance, and that the criminal justice system is really just a joke to anyone who’s been on the inside.

Starting us off with a couple of statistics about reoffending in the UK; 33.2% of those released from custody or starting court orders, growing up to 55.5% of those released from custodial sentences of less than 12 months; you might think that writer/director, Chris Clynes is going to give us some sort of short, sharp documentary into life beyond the criminal justice system. Instead what he’s got for us in Good Guy, is a two-act play with him as the star.

Sitting with his shirt off, and proudly displaying his wolf neck-tattoo, our guy starts talking to us directly through the camera. He’s chugging some cheap Stella knock-off and is waxing lyrical about how easy it gets to do time on the inside. Every so often he looks straight down the barrel to leave us in no doubt that he’s talking to us, but really he’s just pleasing himself in bigging up how much of a man he is, and how the system is bullshit, and how no-one could be expected to live by the normal rules – which is why he keeps finding himself in prison all the time.

The camera stays fairly static throughout, just with a dramatically slow push shot thrown in towards the end of the monologue, and we’re left sitting with Guy, listening to his ranting until he’s done. That is until about half-way through, where we get some transition, and then we’re into scene two, where he’s got some clothes on, but is standing against a similarly bare white wall as before, with the light off. A phone call with Nan provides some emotional context to Guy’s story and finally we see some vulnerability as he contends with perhaps knowing that he’s not always making the best choices in life. A sad lament for a violent thug.

What we get during the fourteen-minutes of Good Guy is an almost static chamber piece, written in two acts, filmed in HD from a single camera and microphone, and performed in monologue by the guy who wrote it, who we can tell from his fake temporary tattoos and peely-wally body that would only get him some admirers on the inside, has probably never actually seen the real insides of a prison. This can make it difficult to connect with Clynes’ performance, too, as we witness him try to spout vicious hard-man lines, when really he seems more like a gentle creative type who prefers treading the boards.

It’s not that Clynes’ ability to carry off the character isn’t there, it’s just that there’s no action or dynamism to the role to allow him to inhabit his character with any sort of realism or believability. Everything in Good Guy is approached as Clynes knows it, as a play, and so he has presented it as such, from one point of view, talking straight to the audience as though he was on stage, never minding about lighting or audio in front of the camera, and keeping everything very still. The character’s monologue keeps most things vague and uses broad brush strokes, not allowing us to get to know the actual character underneath, but instead gives us a stock, standard, anonymous villain who we never learn anything personal about. Beyond the turmoil of a fairly archetypal character, there’s not much else to see here.

In amongst it all, Clynes does manage to work through his themes and create an arc to the story, to at least make you think when the credits roll. Guy Cooper is an everyman criminal caught in a system that doesn’t care for him, which makes his story one of many. It’s just not clear what makes his story different enough from all the others to tell it.