Film Reviews

44 Inch Chest

• Rating:
• Director: Malcolm Venville.
• Starring: Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson.
• Details: UK / 95mins (18).

From the writers of Sexy Beast, the oddly-titled 44 Inch Chest boasts a sterling cast at the top of their game, and winds itself tightly. Instead of powering on to the climax, however, this tough drama loses its punch and whimpers to a halt. Colin Diamond (Winstone) is a London gangster with a broken heart. His wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) is leaving him for a younger man - a French waiter, no less - and Col has flipped. Big time. In a state of abject despair, brought on by copious amounts of alcohol, Col has kidnapped 'the guy' (Melvil Poupaud, Time To Leave), dragged him to a disused safe house, and - now surrounded by gang mates Peanut (Hurt), Meredith (McShane), Mal (Stephen Dillane) - is debating what to do with him. The old school, homophobic, misogynist and foul-mouthed Peanut (whose use of the C-word must now be in the record books) can't believe that everyone is standing around thinking about what to do with him - in his day you'd do him and you'd do him slow - but Col has other plans... Set for the most part in one room, you'd be forgiven for thinking 44 Inch Chest is an adaptation of a play, but no. A British gangster flick with no heist, no action and very little violence, this drama is high on tension and is kept ticking over thanks to the performances of its heavyweight cast. With little to do but sit around, smoke fags and wait for something to kick off, Wilkinson, Dillane, Hurt and McShane fill out the film, bouncing off each with sparkling banter while Winstone balances the gruff with sensitivity. The movie can't be flawed here. However, 44 Inch Chest suffers the same fate as Sexy Beast. If you thought that that gangster movie, now deemed a modern classic, was great up until a point, that it peaks too early with the death of you-know-who, you're in good company. 44 Inch Chest follows suit. For an hour, this is a gripping drama but then it turns a corner into an ill-advised David Lynch tangent where the characters swap personas with each other; the sequence is supposed to depict Col's descent into madness, but it doesn't work. It's distracting, unnecessary, and it bursts the bubble of tension writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto strived so hard to create. When it recovers, the remainder of the film fails to build on what went before and just peters out.

Review by Gavin Burke