Title: Bullhead

Opens: February 17, 2012

There’s a reason that people fly into rages over incidents that a rational person would consider almost neutral. Jackie (Matthias Schoenaerts), whose body is ripped from taking steroids, is a character looking for a revenge that the audience must consider thoroughly justified.

In one of the several flashbacks, a handsome but decidedly weak 12-year-old unable to defend himself, is set upon by local young toughs, his testicles literally crushed, leading Jackie to grow up critically disturbed.

With sharp editing and some reliance on slow-motion tehcniques by Alain Dessauvage and lensing in Dutch-speaking Belgium by Nicolas Karakatsanis, writer-director Michael R. Roskam takes us into the seedy underworld surrounding the “hormone mafia,” the story based on a murder in the 1990s of a Belgian vet who has been checking on farmers suspected of using illegal growth hormone on cattle

When Jackie’s veterinarian friend, Sam (Frank Lammers), insists that Jackie deal with a meat marketer, De Kuyper (Sam Louwyck), Jackie is not convinced since the police are looking into the killing of a cop investigating this Dutch-speaking mafia.

The entire plot, however, is an excuse, if I may, for a character study of Jackie, who has been waiting for two decades for revenge against the guy who smashed his cojones, bulking himself up to cover an emptiness that he feels for a life that he considers ruined. We get a clear impression that he considers the cattle that he injects with hormones to be symbolic of his own character.

Though the picture is overlong at over two hours, Belgian-produced “Bullhead,” which is one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Picture, ranks among the better depictions of a disturbed man whose who has dedicated his life to avenging the insult he received as a boy.

Unrated. 124 minutes (c) 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member NY Film Critics Online

Overall – B