44 Inch Chest (18)

THIS latest script from the writers of Sexy Beast plays like a stage play – mostly confined to a single set with a set of characters talking, their expletive-packed dialogue relieved by the occasional violent outburst.

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Director Malcolm Venville does little to open out the action or tone down a script that would last half as long if all the f and c words were removed.

Geezer Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) loses it big time when wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) tells him their marriage is over.

Informing him that running off with a younger, better-looking man (Melvil Poupaud) rubs salt into the wound.

Diamond reacts in the way you’d expect. He gets violent with his fists after giving her a mouthful of venom. His wife’s lover, a waiter, is kidnapped from the restaurant where he works by Colin and his gangland chums – mummy’s boy Archie (Tom Wilkinson), smart Mal (Stephen Dillane), gay Meredith (Ian McShane) and aggressive Old Man Peanut (John Hurt).

The poor chap, Loverboy as he’s known, is tied to a chair and generally abused, mentally and physically, by the ragtag bunch of ageing London criminals. The debate is simple: should Colin kill his wife’s lover?

44 Inch Chest does feel stagey and contrived but the acting, from Winstone’s anguished betrayed husband to Hurt’s dirtymouthed old man, is every bit as convincing as you’d expect from such a top notch cast.

And it certainly makes a change from the usual violent British gangster movie.