Plot
An ex-con hired to look after a reclusive young actress finds himself falling in love, which puts him in direct confrontation with one of London's most vicious gangsters.

Release Year: 2010

Rating: 6.3/10 (17,478 voted)

Critic's Score: 52/100

Director: William Monahan

Stars: Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley, Ray Winstone

Storyline
Mitchel ('Colin Farrell' ) just got out of jail and wants to stay legitimate but his friends involved in the messy London underground fear him and wants him to join them again but Mitchel tries his best to stay away. He gets himself a job as a bodyguard for a retired actress Charlotte (

Writers: William Monahan, Ken Bruen

Cast:
Colin Farrell - Mitchel
Keira Knightley - Charlotte
David Thewlis - Jordan
Anna Friel - Briony
Ben Chaplin - Billy Norton
Ray Winstone - Gant
Eddie Marsan - DI Bailey
Sanjeev Bhaskar - Dr. Raju
Stephen Graham - Danny
Ophelia Lovibond - Penny
Jamie Campbell Bower - Whiteboy
Velibor Topic - Storbor
Lee Boardman - Lee
Alan Williams - Joe
Jonathan Cullen - Anthony Trent

Taglines: Not every criminal wants to be one.

Official Website: Official site | Official site [Germany] |

Release Date: 26 November 2010

Filming Locations: Dulwich, London, England, UK

Opening Weekend: £577,224 (UK) (28 November 2010) (345 Screens)

Gross: $6,872,403 (Worldwide) (19 June 2011)

Runtime: 103 min

Trivia:
The Chinese words on the package are the title of "The Departed", which is written by William Monahan as well. Infernal Affairs (the movie The Departed was based on) was incorrectly called "a Japanese film" during the 79th Academy Awards; Jordan emphasizes "he got it from Hong Kong" here.

Goofs:
Continuity: When the copper first appears at the flat where Mitchell is staying, he clearly introduces himself as 'Detective Sergeant Bailey'. But in the credits he is identified as 'DI Bailey'.

Welcome to the disappointment

Rating: 5/10

In a lot of ways, this is a puzzling movie. Every single element of it is so right, so how does it end up being so completely uninvolving that I ended up nearly falling asleep halfway through? The problem isn't the casting; Colin Farrell makes a hell of a gangster, all smouldering machismo stomping through the streets of London. And with a supporting cast that includes Eddie Marsan (sleazy), David Thewlis (sleazier) and Ben Chaplin (sleaziest, and very, very good), Farrell has some excellent support. Ray Winstone has never been scarier, but of all people it's Anna Friel who takes the acting honours as Farrell's sister, a woman who out-sleazes Marsan, Thewlis and Chaplin combined.

The problem isn't the locations, or how true to life they are. I lived in London for a long time, and I've rarely seen the city depicted better, all back streets and alleyways with nasty bastards lurking around every grubby corner. Considering the film's writer and director William Monahan is from Boston, I was worried that this might be the tourist's eye view of London, but that really isn't the case. The film positively drips with atmosphere, and the expletive-heavy dialogue rings true.

And yet it all sits there, lifeless on the screen, a collection of images and characters that seem only vaguely related to one another. It doesn't help that the main plot - will Farrell become a proper gangster, or will he end up with Keira Knightley's way-too-good-for-him actress - is hardly new. But that doesn't have to be a deal breaker, and there are plenty of interesting minor characters to pass the time.

The problem is really that the film feels rushed. Those minor characters aren't given nearly enough time - Marsan gets three scenes, none of them remotely important to the plot, and even Anna Friel doesn't get a lot to do. She's still better off than Stephen Graham and Sanjeev Bhaskar, great actors who are cast in completely pointless roles that could have been played by anyone. And so much of this movie feels tacked on, from the dozen or so subplots, to Winstone's pointless murder of the wrong man halfway through, to the stalker, obviously based on Mark David Chapman, who makes several ominous appearances and is then dismissed in a single line of dialogue.

If some subplots and characters are pointless, though, the ending made me feel that way about the whole damn film. Without giving too much away, it's a horrible, limp lettuce of an ending, with none of the resonance that the film-makers clearly thought it had achieved. That's the film in a nutshell - it wanted to be profound, but ended up as a giant 'so what?'

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