Sparky, enjoyable comedy.
Less a movie than a flimsy patchwork of scenes, many of which look as though they were shot without the benefit of a director.
Deftly structured around multiple characters and boasting some of the finest dialogue in a gangster movie since Sexy Beast the picture is a chilling and darkly comic portrait of human greed, corruption and exploitation.
Weird. But diverting.
It's a film with plenty of front, as they say, but uses up all its energy, wit and ideas in the first 20 or so minutes, before collapsing into a flurry of boring violence.
London Boulevard should have been a classic – which makes its failure all the more pronounced.
Zingers the film can do, so it’s a crying shame how disjointed it gets, crumpled into a narrow range of Brit-gangster idioms, picking quite the wrong ending, and barely holding it together from scene to scene.
It works neither as romance nor as urban thriller.
The authenticity Monahan gave The Departed is AWOL from a directorial debut that ends, pretentiously, with the film burning in the projector. You’ll wish it had happened halfway through.
Brutal, bloody and with a plot that's all over the place, it seems we're taking delivery of our Christmas turkey a month early.
The only redeeming feature is Chris Menges's excellent photography.
It's a spiralling, overcrowded, over-complicated folly.
It's a mostly diverting, stylishly shot scramble: this year's Lucky Number Slevin.
Colin Farrell interview
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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