User:Mariajones10

London Boulevard
Author William Monahan's directorial debut, an urban crime drama-meets-Notting Hill really like story, features all the fundamentals: a strong cast, fascinating characters and some nifty dialogue, a gritty London environment and lots of plot likely. Also significantly of everything, as it turns out. Lead Colin Farrell's bewildered encounter is only a hint of what's to come, and shortly adequate London Boulevard is veering dementedly off the tracks at the pace of the train from Unstoppable. Though an more and more barmy plot peopled by crazies isn't automatically a box workplace deterrent, it's hard to picture anyone walking away from this with no scratching their heads. Wealthy technical credits and a leading-line cast may well entice audiences and pique cable curiosity to begin with, but London Boulevard is a curio at very best.

Farrell, as just lately-launched criminal Mitchel, brings to head what LBJ mentioned about Gerald Ford strolling and chewing gum as he attempts to act even though delivering a 'sarf'-London accent. Whilst the energy adds a small frisson to events, it also seems to have stunned the actor, top to the summary that his character may well have taken an individual too a lot of beatings close to the head.

After his stretch for GBH, Mitchel is met at Pentonville prison by his dodgy mate Billy (Ben Chaplin, powerful). Mitchel wishes to go straight, but requires Billy up on his provide of a suspicious apartment in Kennington. One particular factor leads to one more, and shortly the Savile Row-suited Mitchel is staying made available a job as gardener-cum-minder to Keira Knightley's Charlotte, a reclusive Sunset Boulevard-y actress, in her lush Notting Hill residence.

"If it wasn't for Monica Bellucci she'd be the most raped actress in European cinema," says Charlotte's "polymath butler" Jordan, played with aplomb by David Thewlis in what ought to be the daftest display screen function in a long time, though Anna Friel as Mitchel's slutty sister Briony presents him a run for his dollars.

If The Departed's Monahan, going behind the digital camera with his personal adaptation of the novel by Ken Bruen, had left it at that, London Boulevard could quite possibly have massaged its way into getting to be a workable commercial prospect. But no, Ray Winstone as London crime boss Gant roars in to up the ante, and a barrage of "fahk you" and "you cant" isn't much behind.

With very little new to deliver to the portion of a deranged London mobster, Winstone's physical appearance is a obvious signal that all bets are now off. The actor plays a sadistic, suit-sporting amalgam of all his previous Cockney gangster characters, and he squares off towards Colin Farrell in a scene at the Criterion Brasserie in which Monahan efficiently torches his own film.

Charlotte/Keira? She's on a aircraft to Los Angeles, the lucky lass, as Monahan hurls that certain plot strand apart to veer wildly off in other directions. There's a murdered hobo, a footballer, the butler, the paparazzi, the Nation of Islam and a Bosnian hitman who seems out of nowhere in a sleazy strip joint to maintain factors thumping along to the point the place you realise that Farrell's baffled appear is certainly the only logical reaction to London Boulevard.

With a strangely anachronistic 1960s-score bumping the viewer around, the only question remaining by the finish credits is whether or not London Boulevard is barmy adequate to sooner or later turn out to be cult viewing.