Very good art has occasionally been made with violent sociopaths and petty criminals as its source material (the Sopranos, to name a recent example). Not here. This is tedious, plodding. Tom Hardy over-acts in a way that would make a high school drama student cringe. The fight scenes are about as realistic as the ones in a John Wayne movie. Most of the five-star reviews seem to come from wanna-be tough guys who, I'm guessing, are missing the massive current of homo-eroticism that runs through the film (Charlie, for an alleged bad-ass, sure has a lot of gay/transvestite friends and, in one scene, a naked Charlie forces a prison librarian to rub him down with lotion and, while he's doing Charlie's rear end, Charlie yells 'faster faster, faster'.). Then again, as that parenthetical remark demonstrates, the current is pretty hard to miss so maybe the reviewers are just into that, consciously or not.