Hardy remarkable as real-life British prisoner in 'Bronson'

English actor Tom Hardy is rumored to be the new Mad Max in that franchise's reboot. If he does end up in Mel Gibson's boots, judging from Hardy's riveting work in the new film "Bronson," the "mad" part won't be an issue.

Not widely known in America, the protagonist of "Bronson" is famous in his home country as "Britain's most violent prisoner," a man (now in his 50s) who has spent 34 years behind bars, 30 of those in solitary confinement.

This is a man, according to Danish co-writer and director Nicolas Winding Refn's floridly stylized picture, who relishes adversity and lives for the thrill of violence.

Born Michael Peterson in West Wales, he adopted the moniker belonging to the star of "Death Wish" as his "fighting name." Each act of on-screen brutality, whether it's Bronson strangling a pedophile (no moral quandary there, according to the film) or anonymous prison guards wielding clubs against the provocateur with the handlebar mustache, becomes an aria of poetic sadism.

The musical score lays on the Wagner, the Verdi, the Puccini and The Pet Shop Boys. The director clearly has boned up on his source material, primarily Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and, in a brothel sequence, David Lynch.

Often Hardy addresses the camera, standing in a black void. Other times he performs a soliloquy based on his life story on a stage, before an audience.

He lays everything out with extreme, methodical menace, punctuating his observations ("I wasn't bad ... not bad bad") with the occasional, mirthless cackle followed by a deadpan glare and several seconds of unnerving silence.

The whole thing seems to be taking place in a music hall inside Bronson's skull.

The movie doesn't apologize for the man's behavior, and while it treats his life as working-class grand opera, it doesn't romanticize how his glanced-upon development as an artist, a poet, an author and a fitness guru may have saved him from his most sociopathic impulses.

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