mattjtemp

For me I felt more than a pang of annoyance when seeing the praise being heaped on the flash but insipid X men 2 and the corny and shakily put together spiderman films when this then was criticised for everything that was its strength.

The storyline of repression of emotion is a faithful yet modern interpretation, the opening scenes covered a great deal of necessary yet potentially dull story telling in a fast and effective way. Lee constantly references the story's original medium and employs arguably the best damn editing alongside JFK that I have ever seen.

Special effects are always going to be important for this type of film and they impressed me far more than other comic related offerings of recent years, or ever in fact. But the notion that a fifteen foot green man does not look real becomes ludicrous, the story of the hulk will always need a higher degree of suspension of disbelief than your normal plot.

The ending has been criticised and did initially confuse me but made sense on second viewing and on third viewing this film went from highly enjoyable to my favourite mainstream film of the year.

Ang Lee has never made a bad film and this one is brilliant.

I dont know what it was in the 90's but UK TV produced GBH, Our Friends in the North and Prime Suspect.

My favourite was GBH, it is so substantially long that all characters receive the fleshing out they deserve, some episodes are hard hitting drama, others are on a smaller more personal level and others are out and out hilarious (one commentator mentions the daleks scene which was verging on slapstick in the midst of high drama and yet it worked perfectly).

Simple to follow yet complicated plot, great all round performances cemented by towering contributions from Robert Lynsey and Michael Palin, while the script wears its heart on its sleeve it does not become too sentimental, nor does it lecture.

Perfect television, and criminally unreleased on dvd, Channel 4 would make a packet if they repeated it then released a spec edition.

There is a real danger watching this film to dismiss it as an ok film with one outstanding performance but that is not the case.

Ben Kingsley does deliver a blistering performance as Don Logan and is at turns fiersome, frustrating and hilarious. Yes this should have won him a best supporting actor oscar but there you go.

But, Ray Winstone, Amanda Redman, Ian McShane all put in excellent performances too (winstone and Mcshane at breakfast in the hotel was superb showing the tension and lies- really cranking up the stress of the situation), it's just that they are overshadowed by the fireworks surrounding Kingsley's character. Is that a criticism by me of the director's construction of this? Nope, I think it was a good script and taut story telling, it had some excellent and innovative work and felt smoothly constructed, it also had a good soundtrack, AND a man-rabbit creature representing all of Gail's fears.

I recommend this to everyone, I think it is one of the few good British gangster films to emerge in recent years (alongside Gangster no1) and pales the flimsy likes of Lock Stock etc. Though it shouldn't even be compared as this is a real story and not a cartoon.