Strong and Moving!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

44 Inch Chest is packed full of bloated, preening masculinity, cold hard chauvinism and dense, wordy exchanges that seem pulled right off the stage, an intense bit of British pseudo-gangster quirk with two writers who seem intent on heightening every syllable to near surreal levels of style. The same scribes are responsible for the glorious verbal stew that can be found in Paul McGuigan's brutal Gangster No. 1 as well as Sexy Beast, and while the level of viciousness here is left almost entirely to the spoken word alone, the elliptical sting of their script still hits home, and even ramps up a bit from those films. A mopey, consistently weepy Ray Winstone stars as boorish Colin Diamond, an gent whose wife (Joanne Whalley Kilmer) has been caught in an affair with a chiseled french pretty boy (Melvil Poupoud). He resorts to a melancholy, comatose state as his perceived manliness visibly circles the drain. His circle of friends arrives, each with their own flamboyant ideas for resolving the situation. Velvety Meredith (Ian McShane, cool as a cucumber) looks on in snooty amusement. Violent guttersnipe Mal (Stephen Dillane, replacing Tim Roth) has the brawn but neither the brains nor ambition to act. Archie (Tom Wilkinson) is the bewildered everyman. Old Man Peanut (a fire and brimstone John Hurt who devours the script like a lion feasting on a gazelle) is a bible thumping, crusty old pot of fury who suggests that wifey should be stoned to death for her indecency and betrayal. They spend the better part of the film pontificating like a babbling senate, whilst Winstone languishes in despair. One wonders what the point of it all is and where it's going, until we arrive at an oddly satisfying third act that somehow negates almost everything we've seen before it. Strangely enough, though, it works, if only to give us something we've never quite seen before, pulling the rug of genre convention out from under us and giving us a piece that almost could resemble a spoof of other works, if it weren't so damned straight faced and persistent in its execution. In any case, I could watch this group of actors assemble ikea furniture and it would still be transfixing. It's just a room full of talent shooting the breeze for most of the running time, and in a genre where one can scarcely here the performers talk over the gunfire and cheekily referential soundtrack a lot of the time, I'll damn well take something a bit more paced, quiet and stately. Winstone smears over his usual seething anger with a morose depression would almost be endearing if it weren't so pathetic. Wilkinson brings his usual studious nature. McShane is pure class in anything (even a few B movies I'm sure he'd love to forget) and he swaggers through this one like a regal peacock, getting some of the best lines to chew on. Dillane is detached and indifferently cruel, with seldom a word uttered, his lack of mannerism contrasted by the vibrant animosity of his three peers. Hurt is pure gold as the closest the film comes to caricature, just a vile old coot who belongs in the loony bin raving to the walls about awful things that happened 'back in his day'. Different is the key word for this one, and one might be easily fooled by the poster and synopses into assuming this is a revenge flick populated by action and violence. Not so much. Although a lot of the time that is my cup of tea, it's nice to get a welcome deviation once in a while, and this one is a real treat.

I did not enjoy this film in the slightest. I was expecting a little bit of action and or violence, and got none. What I did get is a bunch of old men sitting around a warehouse for an hour and a half trying to talk hard and failing. They swear constantly and try to talk like scary London criminals, but it's just embarrassing. There are no redeeming events in the plot and all in all this is just a bad film. The ending is a complete anti-climax, where nothing really happens. I expected better from the likes of Ray Winstone and John Hurt.If you like listening to a bunch of old men swear, drink whiskey and try and talk dangerous, then watch this film. If you have better things to do then don't bother, especially if you're a Ray Winstone fan.

44 inch chest received mixed reviews but one thing is evident to me. Whenever a reviewer doesn't know what say, or is genuinely afraid to look beyond the obvious, he/she invariably says very little or nothing about the piece and instead, heaps praise upon the only thing they can be sure of getting right and that is the quality of those actors who have already established themselves as leading and substantial performers, in other words, they state the bleeding obvious.Mr Roby in the telegraph even went so far (after exaggerating the facts regarding the story)as to narrow it down to three brilliant actors, presumably leaving out in the cold those wonderful actors who were not Mr Winstone, Mr Hurt and Mr McShane.44inch chest is a refreshing break with the standard London gang land film and manages to explore well below the surface of the characters and the world in which such people live and operate. It is a story of people , who happen to be Crims, rather than another tale woven around brutal murder, robbery and guns. Much(too much)has been made of the profanity, for goodness sake, you can hear this level of language in any London pub, in any garage workshop or factory in England, what do people expect from such men and women? they must use this level of profanity to be credible. From the start, where, like an overture, the camera beautifully creates the atmosphere, to the very end, the film is brilliantly constructed with the exception of one scene, a scene which I would have cut out and thrown far away. So as to avoid spoilers, I will identify the scene I hated, as simply "Pink car." The only other change I would have made was to set the white bedroom scene where it belonged, that is in the hell hole and acted out rather than visited and viewed. The story is a beauty, the characters are to die for, the work from all, I say this again the work from ALL the Actors was first class. I cannot recall a film ever where the performances were all quite so equal as they are in 44 inch chest, there is not a dud moment from any one of them. This is the kind of film that will stand up on its back legs in 30 years time as the granddad of a genre all its own. Here theatre is brought closer to film than at any other time.Those who have complained that the film lacks drive and contrast and variety are alongside those who have claimed that it is anti climactic. This says much more about the reviewers than it says about the film, which, by the way, never lacks drama or drive and neither does it end without considerable climax. In fact, it is one of those wonderful stories that nags at you for months after you have finished watching it. I would have given it 9 out of ten but for that one scene.

You couldn't ask for more from a quality cast but what they had to play with was neither compelling nor cohesive, the whole time I was waiting for something memorable to happen but it never came. There is however an odd pun and memory flashback which keeps the storyline on track. To sum it up 44" Chest barely stirs enough interest to endure what feels like casual conversation with over the top foul language.On a seemingly unrelated note, whatever happened to Mr. Black magic's dark world of the east end gangster? I know this release wasn't connected to Sexy Beast but surely now there can be no prequel or sequel.