I spent a lot of time working in NYC in the '70s and '80s. It was a scary place. The danger as real and one did not walk freely about. Everyone had horror stories of they or someone they knew being robbed and/or beaten, raped, groped or menaced in some threatening way. In my experience it was scary in every big city in America at the time but NYC was in a class by itself.

Michael Winner's 1974 'Death Wish' with Charles Bronson may seem over the top to today's viewers but it more accurately than not captures the violent chaos of those days. I was looking forward to seeing a recreation of those times as there is a lot of fertile ground to till but here the the fields lie strangely fallow. Nothing, in this movie, evokes, the reality of the time. We hear snippets of news reports. That's it.

The movie takes place almost entirely, in abandoned industrial areas, bleak offices or the protagonist's new, modern house isolated deep in some unspecified leafy suburb. For all but one, the locations could be almost anywhere.

The movie purports to show the how the competing forces in the heating oil business conducted themselves and our hero's struggle to keep to the moral high ground. This is all, laughably, naive and presented with a plodding, leaden seriousness not helped much by the clichéd stock characters that occupy the supporting cast. Oscar Isaac's earnest, one note, Pacino impersonation and Jessica Chastain's shallow stab at a tough, Brooklyn mob boss daughter are more distracting than engaging.

One senses that Chastain was having some fun with it but she really doesn't have enough to do.There's a rich characterisation in there somewhere that never has a chance to be realised even though the movie seems to last forever.

All in all JC Chandor is in way over his head here. All he manages to convey is strong sense of his own misplaced self importance.