Growing up I was into a lot of different music, punk music being one of them, but a band never really stood a chance of making it into my collection if they didn’t offer me that something that made every turn memorable. The Sex Pistols were less about the music then they were about the fuck all attitude they expressed through their style and that stuck with me then even to now. I wouldn’t discover Sid & Nancy until later, about 89 I’d say, but when I did, the film spoke to me. It said everything that I wanted to hear about being an angry teenager and gave me the power to believe that I could dig myself out of a hole, make money by the fistful, and then simply throw it all away in a beautiful downward spiral of waste because the future looked bleak anyway and, lets face it, I probably wasn’t going to live to be 20. That was then, this is now.

I haven’t seen the film in a very long time and when I found it in my work pile I was eager to be alone to watch it. Unfortunately for me the film just didn’t hold up. Gone are the days in which I threw caution to the wind and lived my life like tomorrow would never come and a certain amount of sophistication in film has made this once classic film a bit clownish. The acting, the way in which it feels like we’ve just stepped into the middle of a movie that will never truly make sense anyway, and the beauty of what punk rock was for me as a kid. It just doesn’t exist for me anymore on so many levels that Sid & Nancy has become laughable when it is not totally disturbing. I mean, if Andrew Schofield tried any harder to look rebellious in this film as Johnny Rotten he might have overshot the part by galaxies instead of just miles.

The Blu-Ray transfer for Sid & Nancy has its ups and downs but for the most part it’s all up. Color is incredibly sharp looking. Just look for the scene where Sid and Wally Hairstyle are walking through the market place. Wally is decked out in all red, including his dyed hair, and it just looks fantastic. Night scenes look surprisingly good with very little issue, day time shots even more detailed and colorful. The film does sport a bit of grain here and there but the transfer is a vast improvement over any of its former releases. I did feel like audio could have been a bit better utilized. There are some scenes where Sid and or Nancy mumble through their lines while on heroine and even at a high volume setting I had to resort to subtitles.

Bonus features for the film are fantastic. For The Love Of Punk is a fifteen minute documentary that focuses on the love story between Nancy and Sid and has interviews from close friends, photographers, VJ’s, and magazine publishers. If you want an insight into what the film is this would be a good place to look first before watching the film. Junk Love is another fifteen minute documentary on, well, drugs and how they played a role in the rise and fall of Sid Vicious. Finally you have the films theatrical trailer. Unfortunately gone are the bonus features from the Criterion version of the film but these new bonus features more then make up for it.