THE HARDER THEY COME REVIEW
by Andrés González:

I guess what I liked the most about this film was it's sheer unpreditability. It's a truly bizarre, wild ride from start to finish, which kept me and my classmates at the edge of our seats the entire time. I don't think it's really all that good, but it seriously was one of the best & most entertaining cinematic experiences I've had the whole year. What starts as a fairly normal underdog story about a reggae musician quickly turns into a weird Scorcese/psycho-thriller mashup. I'm pretty sure no one saw that coming, but we had a blast. The incompetent special effects, the awkward dialogue/line delivery and the non-stop twist and turns just made it even better, in a charming way. Plus, some of the camerawork, specially the use of zooms was actually very impressive.

On the other hand, what I didn't like about the film, outside of certain plot points and characters that didn't convince me all that much, was it's portrayal of women, of course. Specially the character of Elsa, played by Janet Bartley, who's presence is really under-utilized, dissapearing for most of the third act of the film; almost as if the filmmakers forgot about her altogether while they were writting and quickly gave a her a couple more scenes when they realized about her absence. The lack of agency given to female characters is bothersome, but the lack of female characters overall is even worse.

If I had to pick one, I'd say that my favorite character is Ivan Martin. I mean, it has to be, right?

He is the only one given a solid journey, aswell as character depth outside of some superficial stuff. His development from an ambitious singer to a power-hungry, fame-seeking, drug-trade-controlling killer is unexpected and honestly pretty exciting to watch. Kinda reminded me of a villain origin story, or (as I mentioned previously) some of Martin Scorcese's early projects, like Taxi Driver or The King Of Comedy. Also, his music is great.

Would I recommend this film? Of course! I literally did right after we finished watching this in class to some of my other classmates in the lunch-break. It's not only an important piece of film/Jamaican history, but an exciting as hell film on it's own right. It deserves to be seen by every film fan just to see how they'll react to it's endless madness. But it also has a lot to say about Jaimaican culture at the time, which takes us to our last point...

This film in dense in content, and it only gets more substantial as we start considering how it reflects some of Jamaica's collective consciousness in a post-colonial world. Yeah, it showcases the state of poverty and dependency most of the country suffered from, but it also puts their search for identity and righteousness in the limelight. As the titular reggae track states, they wanna take back what is theirs, what was stolen from them by the colony. A powerful sentiment that can be translated to violent action; exactly what Ivan Martin ends up doing on his own, demented way.