Written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who penned Sexy Beast, and adorned by a cast which includes John Hurt, Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson and Joanne Whalley, this strange kitchen-sink psychodrama about a cuckolded tough guy ought to be better.
But strewn as it is with so many swear words beginning with f and c, it too often degenerates into a parody of itself.
Winstone is the tough guy in question and Whalley the wife who has taken up with a French waiter (Melvil Poupaud), rendering him a catatonic mess.
His doubtful cockney friends, grouping round him with varying degrees of sympathy, capture the offending waiter, lock him in a cupboard and encourage the distraught husband to take violent revenge.
Malcolm Venville’s film looks like a play that ought to have been written by Harold Pinter.
In which case, the swearing would have been less and the humour neatly buried in menace.
But here Winstone’s trauma, seriously and effectively portrayed, is constantly upended by the comedic performances of Hurt as a drunken old East End geezer, McShane as a gay gangster, and Wilkinson as an over-the-hill conman.
They are indeed very funny — especially Hurt’s toothy veteran.
But the film’s theme, essentially about macho men ruined by their adoration of women who are less saintly than they thought, gets well and truly waylaid in the process.
Distinctive as it is, there’s not much in the end that remains in the memory except the performances. And there ought to be more.
44 Inch Chest
Cert: 18
