- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75What enriches the recipe is that no one is quite as cagey as they seem. Colin is officially thuggish, but he's a blinkered romantic. Archie is a mama's boy, Meredith is gay, Mal is impotent, and Peanut wears dentures.
-
70As in "Sexy Beast", Mellis and Scinto's rhythmically aggressive dialogue becomes arialike. But first-time director Malcolm Venville lacks the visual flair of Sexy Beast's Jonathan Glazer -- a deficit that, combined with 44 Inch Chest's wobbly final act, comes dangerously close to erasing the film's uninhibited look at the measure of a man.
-
63The best reason to see 44 Inch Chest is simply to behold some of the finest actors working today, especially Winstone -- who can embody winsomeness and menace in one sweaty, unkempt glance -- and the woefully underemployed Dillane.
-
63It's a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.
-
60A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way.
-
50The film's action takes place mainly in one room, with the five characters posturing like angry macho men but slowly revealing their arrested development and juvenile ignorance of life in general and women in particular.
-
50Mostly, though, 44 Inch Chest is complacently in love with the rhythmically profane talk that came so easily to writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto in "Sexy Beast."
-
50Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.
-
50Ultimately, 44 Inch Chest has very little on its mind.
-
50It's an interesting spectacle, but not enough to carry a movie.
-
50It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors' workshop.
-
Structurally, 44 Inch Chest resembles "Reservoir Dogs"; but, without the added amusement of Tarantino's skewing of narrative time, it feels very much more like a direct adaptation of a stage play (which apparently it's not). The filmmakers do goose things up by playing with reality in the second half, but it all leads to a payoff that, while perfectly legitimate, feels limp.
-
50Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.
-
4044 Inch Chest gets by on the quality of its performances.
-
40The cast to die for is almost entirely wasted in this machismo-marinated slab of Brit-crime nastiness.
-
40Ultimately, though, even the company of these brilliant actors can't compensate for the limp, shapeless plot. With nowhere to go dramatically, the last third dissolves into a haze of flashbacks and fantasy sequences.
-
40On the debit side, and it's a doozy, the picture's narrative trajectory fails to deliver a third act that takes the story anywhere of note except into a silly realm of cut-rate surrealism. Final reel ends not with the expected bang but with an almost inaudible whimper.
-
25There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 0 out of 1
-
Mixed: 1 out of 1
-
Negative: 0 out of 1