I saw this with a friend as a second choice compromise and we were both pleasingly surprised. This is a very violent film with gratuitous obscene language in abundance and if that puts you off, don't see it. It doesn't betray its stage origins much either save in two longish scenes at the beginning and end between Thewlis and McDonald.
It is a story about gang warfare in London in the late Sixties and the rise to power of the main character who is never named (indeed in the credits he is noted as gangster 55). I'm not one to look for such subtexts usually but this had a strong homoerotic theme below it - the gangster is never seen to be intimate with a woman and is intensely jealous of the Thewlis character, whereby hangs the whole film.
One particular gory scene is seen by the audience from the victim's point of view and really is very frightening - the young actor playing the gangster, and like another reviewer his name escapes me, was very good in this particular scene (and indeed throughout) and should go far.
Malcolm McDowell redeems his years in (presumably lucrative) American tat with a role he could got well over the top in and get away with it. And Jamie Foreman does a good impression of someone who could be the now dead Ronnie Kray, who he apparently knew as a young boy.
The best though is Thewlis - I'll go to see anything with him in, even the Big Lebowski, and I'm never disappointed.
An 8 out of 10 from me.
It is a story about gang warfare in London in the late Sixties and the rise to power of the main character who is never named (indeed in the credits he is noted as gangster 55). I'm not one to look for such subtexts usually but this had a strong homoerotic theme below it - the gangster is never seen to be intimate with a woman and is intensely jealous of the Thewlis character, whereby hangs the whole film.
One particular gory scene is seen by the audience from the victim's point of view and really is very frightening - the young actor playing the gangster, and like another reviewer his name escapes me, was very good in this particular scene (and indeed throughout) and should go far.
Malcolm McDowell redeems his years in (presumably lucrative) American tat with a role he could got well over the top in and get away with it. And Jamie Foreman does a good impression of someone who could be the now dead Ronnie Kray, who he apparently knew as a young boy.
The best though is Thewlis - I'll go to see anything with him in, even the Big Lebowski, and I'm never disappointed.
An 8 out of 10 from me.