Movie Review: 44 Inch Chest

Posted On: February 11, 2010
Posted By: odeisel
Comments: 1

By Malice Intended

Dark psychological dramas promise us the chance to indulge and analyze our deepest fears, and to confront frailties we would rather not think about. Often, the darker the premise, the more we are intrigued. When the story is grounded firmly in a real, plausible situation, it offers us a chance to explore our limits in a voyeuristic fashion. In order to truly satiate our morbid curiosity, the film in question has to have the courage of its convictions. It has to follow through on the dark path it maps out for itself.

44 Inch Chest tells the story of Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone), a London Gangster who is sent into an emotional tailspin when his wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) confesses that she has been carrying on an affair. Colin’s friends Meredith (Ian McShane), Peanut (John Hurt), Archie (Tom Wilkinson) and Mal (Stephen Dillane) kidnap Liz’s lover (Melvil Poupaud) and hold him hostage while the emotionally crushed Colin decides what to do with him. All the while, the possibility of violence hangs ominously in the air.

44 Inch Chest uses the world of British gangsters as its backdrop. The main plot, which revolves around one man’s struggle with his wife’s infidelity, is neither hindered nor helped by this device. The main characters could just as well have been guys with ordinary jobs. The result is a well-made actors’ showcase that sets up an interesting premise but has no real follow through.

The events unfold in a single room, the squalid conditions of which, seem to suggest Colin’s inner turmoil and confusion. The environment suits the material and ramps up the tension. The muddy browns and murky lighting go a long way towards fostering uneasiness with the viewer. Like the kidnapped loverboy, the viewer desperately wants to escape this drab torture chamber.

Director Malcolm Venville and his cinematographer Daniel Landin try to keep things interesting from a visual standpoint. It’s easy for such stories to get trapped in a hamster wheel of monotony, with such a Spartan amount of scene changes. We are offered flashbacks and dream sequences that serve as an opportunity to not only flesh out the story, but offer visual respite from the confounding surroundings. The bright, antiseptic world of Colin’s home stands in stark contrast to the abject poverty suggested by the hotel room.

Writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto try to keep things interesting with an impenetrable barrage of profanity, jokes, anecdotes, and ponderous dialogue. Most of this is delivered in broad, melodramatic fashion. It works in small doses. If the film were to be separated into small vignettes to be digested individually, any one of these moments could be compelling on its own. When strung together to serve a simple plot, it just feels repetitious. None of it does a good job of mining the themes of the film nor allows for properly milking the plot of its dramatic potential.

Ray Winstone is good as the outwardly fearsome Colin. His appearance suggests that of an English bar brawler, but the situation reduces him to an indecisive drunken mess. The rest of the cast basically serves as stock characters, each representing a part of Colin’s troubled mind.

Each actor tries to inject their respective role with a bit of personality to varying degrees of success. Ian Mcshane is amusing as the suave Meredith, though some of his character traits and mannerisms seem like window dressing. John Hurt’s grumbling, crotchety portrayal of peanut grows tiresome over the running time. We feel as though we’ve seen all the character has to offer in the first few scenes.

44 Inch Chest is a well crafted yet shallow drama. It promises more than it can ultimately deliver. It forgoes the easy and obvious thrills of a typical gangster film and opts to go for something deeper, but that just shows how unnecessary the crime film trappings were in the first place. Our patience is tested, yet by the time a point finally materializes it is hardly enough to justify the time it took us to get there. 44 Inch Chest is frustratingly less than the sum of its parts, which is surely not what its makers intended.
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