This muscular British crime thriller, which opened this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, nods to American crime genre procedural films like Thief, the retro-tooling of Drive and, on the homegrown side of things, the grit of The Sweeney or The Long Good Friday.
Stylistically underpinning the whole film is a propulsive score by director Gerard Johnson’s brother, Matt, better known in the music world as The The.
It’s a carefully calibrated mix of slick US action and British realism tempered with pitch black humour (especially in a very witty bus scene) which gives the film a flavour all its own and lifts it out of the rank and file of geezer crime flicks.
A bent London drug squad is under investigation by the Met’s Internal Affairs while, at the same time, a burgeoning turf war from rival gang factions threatens to up-end both the criminal status quo and the sweet backhanders lining Detective Logan and his team’s pockets.
The low-key cast feels a good fit in a genre which would commonly try and shoehorn in a star face regardless of puncturing its fictional world. Keen viewers will spot familiar faces from several of Ben Wheatley’s films including Kill List with which this film will likely share a similar audience. But like Wheatley’s oeuvre, Johnson is not a filmmaker who shies away from scenes of uncompromising brutality.
Crucially the violence doesn’t ever feel gratuitous, but rather a vehicle to carry the moral centre of the film which aims for a critique of machismo and violence, delivered with a bleak nihilism which few would accuse of glamorising its subject matter.