A film like last year's "Prisoners" shows that a similar premise can be played for powerful, thought-provoking drama. The makers of "Big Bad Wolves" may want to claim a serious social critique for their film, but they have elected to bury it so deeply within thriller genre conventions that most viewers won't bother to dig for it. Of course, there's a worldwide market for Tarantino-style seriocomic violent brutality, and Papushado and Keshales can be credited with giving the Israeli cinema a kind of genre filmmaking that it has seldom produced. That's an achievement of sorts, surely, but it's a far lesser one than a more artistically ambitious film could have provided.
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