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For most of 2000, gangsters and grimness were joined at the hip. And rightly so, since most British gangster films - each desperate to follow Guy Ritchie's example of generating cash through crime (on the screen, that is) - were grim in the extreme. Directors who may as well have left the lens cap on for all the difference it would have made, were being let out of school much too early.
And so it comes as an extremely pleasant surprise - well, shock actually - to welcome a gangster film of some quality, even if, through a few too many plot twists and turns, it is finally derailed by its own ambitions. Still, a less than perfect film with a great deal of ambition is generally more appetising than a perfect one with none.
"The Criminal" makes a journey through classic film noir as it takes J (Steven Mackintosh), an opinionated but well-meaning sap, throws him into the arms (and bosom) of Sarah, a lustful femme fatale and watches his life dissolve. They go back to his flat, her body ends up on the floor, and a disgruntled, boorish cop (Bernard Hill) arrives to complete J's misery. Double-crossings and framings quickly become the order of the day.
Director Julian Simpson creates a persistent air of stifling claustrophobia, and this is a suitable fit for the army of oppressive characters, the seediness of the settings, and J's anxious inner state. The atmosphere is only blown by Simpson's fondness for over-thickening the plot (letting J be found with a second corpse, for example), but even these scenes are blessed with the class of actors like Mackintosh, Hill, and Eddie Izzard (as an earnest forensic cop).
Read an interview with Natasha Little, who plays Sarah in "The Criminal".
