There is nothing "surgical" about the operation, nothing "surgical" about chaos, destruction, and death. In medical terms, if the patient doesn't survive the surgery, it was not quite surgical enough.
What the film has conjured up is a splendid caricature. Timothy Spall plays Turner as a ruddy, bristled, open-pored brute and grunts his way through the movie, offering contortions of face and body that by some acting alchemy are not only persuasive but strangely compelling.
