Pretty Good

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Outstanding British gangster/crime flick. Giving it a full ten because it has one fairly sympathetic character in the plot--I am getting a bit tired or more current films in which every single protagonist is despicable. I really like movies like this, because, while it is admittedly a work of fiction, I really do believe that it captures the essence of how serious criminals behave and makes me very glad that I have always steered clear of them. Unlike so many crime thriller/dramas, it would be very difficult for me to imagine that anyone watching this movie would feel that it glorifies crime or criminal behavior, while it still delivers generous servings action and suspense. There is no Godfather-like mystique or whatever it is that people like about that movie here. This movie is excellent, but you wouldn't want anything to do with these people in real life, which is how it actually is with dangerous criminals in the real world. Pretty much everybody in this movie is so unappealing that this film might even work as a "Scared Straight" sort of thing. There is no glamor here, just really unpredictable, greedy, blood-thirsty, power-hungry psychopaths mostly getting their just deserts eventually. In summary, an exceptionally well-done and compelling cautionary tale about really undesirable people doing really undesirable things which will make you glad that we have laws designed to protect those of us unlike this from those of us like this.

This abrasive British gangster movie set in Essex, a county due east of London, thrives on double-crosses galore. None of the underworld characters are role models, much less noble individuals, and they live to ascend to the top of their rackets over anybody's dead body. No, the English accents are not thatthick, but you may find it difficult to make it through this thoroughly unsavory crime thriller. Everybody is prepared to kill, kill, kill and the rugged life of British mobsters is short-lived. Incidentally, the British police loiter on the edges of the action. Ostensibly, the story is told by an enterprising but harmless cabdriver named Billy Reynolds (Charlie Creed-Miles) who gets mixed with with ex-convicts Jason Locke (Sean Bean of "GoldenEye") and John Dyke (Tom Wilkinson of "Rush Hour") who operate in the cutthroat narcotics smuggling business. They specialize in Ecstacy, or what they refer to as 'spotted pills' and a bad shipment threatens to undo the partnership between Locke and Dyke. Locke mistreats his wife, Lisa Locke (Alex Kingston of NBC-TV's "ER")with casual abandon and openly has sex with any tart to whom he takes a fancy. When she catches him giving it to another woman, she goes ballistic and howls about how she maintained her loyality to him by abstaining from sex during the five years he spent in prison. He reminds her that he does as it likes and them publicly humiliates her and sends her groveling to her knees in front of everybody. As we learn later on, Lisa is a woman not to be scorned.Director Terry Winsor and scenarist Jeff Pope based this 102-minute, R-rated thriller on the notorious Rettendon Range Rover Murders," where authorities discovered three gangsters gunned down and left for dead shot in a Range Rover during one snowy evening. Billy proves his worth as a driver and Dyke loans him to loose cannon hood Jason Locke who has no qualms about throwing people out of windows or strangling uncooperative girls that refuse to let him have his way with them. Action develops gradually with less characters winning in the end over the crazed Locke. Winsor handles things nicely enough and the ending is truly a revelation along with Alex Kingston's role as Locke's wife. Not as charismatic as "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" or for that matter any of the other Guy Ritchie crime melodramas. Humor is singularly lacking in this no-nonsense outing. The moral is obvious: do not associate with shady characters who use guns to settle their arguments and are forever paranoid about witnesses to the massacres they have seen.

An entertaining work despite trying to do too much.They are trying to do a story based on an actual event then fictionalize it then try to make it in the stylized version of the U.K. gang films.There is an abundance of accents and moments that seem very familiar (as if they've been inspired by other movies).There is no lack of violence, nudity and swerves as required for a gangster picture but in all, I enjoyed watching it.It's not a classic but it's better than a lot of gangster flicks out there.I'm glad I gave it a shot.

For those who remember the actual triple murder in Essex which inspired the film, this carries an added edge of realism. The setting - the mock-tudor nouveau riche houses of the gangsters, the Southend seafront, the freezing marshes where Billy runs for his life, are as evocative, as the true-to-life performances of Sean Bean, Alex Kingston and Tom Wilkinson. It is refreshing to see a film which portrays the underworld in all its vindictive pettiness - the little slights which turn into murderous feuds - dozens poisoned by a rogue batch of E, a young girl, dead from an overdose, casually dumped at sea...The Hollywood view of Gangland England has been too long focused on the East End - Snatch, Long Good Friday, Lock, Stock... when real Londoners know the East End's good for curry houses, and the gangsters headed out to the Home counties years ago.Interesting to note that several comments in the reviews of this superlative film concerned the unintelligible accents. I should point out that viewers in the UK (and Holland and most Scandinavian countries) regularly enjoy American films without the aid of subtitles, so how come you find it so hard to understand us? :) We didn't complain that the cast of Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas had New York accents, so why complain that the Essex boys have Essex accents?