44 Inch Chest

Hurt locker: Winstone and Hurt

Directed by Malcolm Venville. Starring Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, Joanne Whalley 18 cert, lim release, 95 min

BEFORE TRYING to make sense of this admirably eccentric British movie, we should clarify what it is not. Despite what the zippy trailers and tasty posters might suggest,

44 Inch Chest(isn't there a missing hyphen here?) could never be mistaken for the new decade's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Nor, despite being written by the team behind Sexy Beast, is it a descendent of that existential geezer melodrama.

Set almost entirely within one room, featuring an impeccably gruff cast, the film could be seen as an attempt to blend the repetitive menace of Harold Pinter (a bag of crisps nods towards that writer's The Dumb Waiter) with the urban sleaze of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance. The project doesn't entirely come off, but its ambition and cussed strangeness set it aside from the mockney pack.

The picture begins with Ray Winstone's tortured bruiser lying in a heap of glass on his living room floor while Nilsson's Without Youblasts out of his speakers. It seems that his wife (Joanne Whalley) has run off with a French waiter, and he can't quite decide what parts of the unfortunate chap's body to slice off.

Later, four of his gangster colleagues join him in a crumbling tenement to discuss responses to their pal’s cuckolding. (Did something similar happen last week in DUP headquarters, I wonder.) Ian McShane plays the sweary gay one. Stephen Dillane plays the sweary slick one. Tom Wilkinson is the sweary mother’s boy. John Hurt is quite brilliant as the sweary Old Man Steptoe.

The interplay between the five main actors is a delight to behold. Somehow, despite having quite different styles, they convincingly occupy the same universe. The smoky cinematography suites the piece nicely, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score throbs with characteristic menace.

For all that, there's no getting away from the fact that 44 Inch Chestplays very much like a filmed play. After the first hour or so, you find yourself longing to get out of the crumbling room for a spell. Mind you, that might have been the effect they were striving for.