99 Homes review: Spider-Man and General Zod get in the face of financial crisis

Not so much entertaining as it is enraging, 99 Homes gets in your face with the injustices suffered by countless hardworking people in the global financial crisis.

Michael Shannon is just the man to represent the stone-cold face of capitalism as a property developer who cashes in on others' misfortunes, while Andrew Garfield is a young father who could go either way when offered the chance to sell his soul.

This would be box office poison were it not for these two fine performances, constructed in layers (before being stripped to their bare bones), so that neither man is wholly good, or evil. Shannon, however, has the tougher job to convey some sort of humanity as Rick Carver, after a brazen opening scene that finds him resolutely unmoved by the suicide of a man he was about to evict.

Carver acts on behalf of a bank that is foreclosing on mortgage deals all over the Florida town where Dennis Nash (Garfield) lives with his mother Lynn (the brilliant Laura Dern) and his little boy Connor (Noah Lomax) - who is just old enough to have an opinion, besides looking cute and vulnerable. Indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has a style that is up-close and personal without begging sympathy.

The drawn-out sequence where Carver inevitably comes knocking on the Nashes' door is harrowing to watch because of the steady way in which emotions escalate, with Carver putting his training into practice to keep a lid on it and the Nashes desperately trying to rationalise with him.

Inevitably, the Nashes lose this fight, but as one door closes (with steel bolts and electrically-controlled locks) another one opens and takes the story in an unusual direction. At the halfway house that Carver presides over, Dennis is offered a job, by Carver. Dennis, perhaps surprisingly, accepts and applies his skills as a construction worker not to build houses but to dismantle them so that Carver can claim money back from the government to refit them - a scam in which Dennis gets a fair cut.

He shows other talents, too, quickly becoming Carver's right-hand man. But that white collar soon grows uncomfortable when Dennis is faced with having to turf out people he knows, one of whom (Tim Guinee) has been wrongly cinched in a legal loophole. The outcome is easier to predict; very neat and a little too melodramatic. The fascination is in watching how far Dennis slips into immorality before getting a good look at himself and how emphatic Carver is in his views; blaming the evictees for wilfully getting in over their heads financially.

This would be box office poison were it not for these two fine performances, constructed in layers (before being stripped to their bare bones), so that neither man is wholly good, or evil.

This affords Shannon a chance to give a grandstanding speech about what's really wrong with America and while it's an obvious contrivance by Bahrani, the delivery is spine-chilling. Of course, multiple scenes of folk being ousted from their homes is never going to be an easy watch, but the film does drag you along and digs in its heels.

Director: Ramin Bahrani; Screenwriters: Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi; Starring: Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, Laura Dern, Clancy Brown; Running time: 112 mins; Certificate: 15