Essex Boys

If you want to "see" what a drug induced blank look really looks like Sean Bean's bedroom scene half way through the movie is a must see. He ain't trying to look good or mean or anything other then just be in the character. And he does that to the exclusion of the rest of the world. He's a git and he will make your skin crawl.

This an an ensemble cast and they fit together wonderfully. The ways they come together and come apart are believable. You may even feel compassion for some of them until you remember what everyone is doing.

At the end of viewing it I thought it was a once through but now a few days later I want to see it again and I am thinking seriously about buying th DVD.

I'm ashamed to admit that I only understood this film the second time I saw it. It is easy to confuse the characters at times as they double cross each other, change camps and generally confuse the viewer to no end.

However, it was worth it for Sean Bean as the psychopathic Jason Locke and Alex Kingston as his femme fatale wife. The guy playing Billy, the narrator, was also very good.

There are very few moments of humour but they certainly work, Lisa's foul mouth, comes to mind as well as the fact that Jason stole the marble lion from his former boss' garden. The plot becomes a bit too confused in the end with Lisa's web of deceit becoming wider and wider.

Moments of violence are very realistic. Jason Locke's treatment of his wife is by far more shocking than anyone flying off a glass window.

As far as the direction is concerned, it is fairly straightforward with some truly excellent editing in the shoot out, near the end as well as in the scene where Mr Dyke (I for one found Tom Wilkinson's gentleman gangster quite believable) is trying to kill Billy.

In all, it is hardly a groundbreaking film but it is very entertaining. I'll give it 7/10.

I just viewed this video, then have read the reviews and am stunned. Was I watching another movie? Sure the characters are shady, but what do you expect, Scorsese-esque, Soprano-ish likeable lots? This is about the seedy, Darwinian underworld and has a compelling story about how Billy (a more cerebral, physically minute character) gets slowly pulled into the bowels of greed and acrimony. The acting is intense and uncompromising. Alex Kingston is wonderful and the actor who played Billy was smart. Certainly not academy award, but interesting fodder nonetheless. A mixture of Sexy Beast & GoodFellas. 7/10

Pretty interesting, not bad. More or less shows the evils of getting too greedy for your own good I guess... Alex Kingston was really good, the guy who played Billy was good too, but Sean Bean was the best. He's a very good actor (and very nice to look at too), he more or less had the whole movie in his hands.

It had a very surprising ending (although I got suspicious and then not-so-suspicious numerous times during the whole movie). The story wasn't bad at all, but watch it for the cast. 6/10.

For those who remember the actual triple murder in Essex which inspired the film, this carries an added edge of realism. The setting - the mock-tudor nouveau riche houses of the gangsters, the Southend seafront, the freezing marshes where Billy runs for his life, are as evocative, as the true-to-life performances of Sean Bean, Alex Kingston and Tom Wilkinson. It is refreshing to see a film which portrays the underworld in all its vindictive pettiness - the little slights which turn into murderous feuds - dozens poisoned by a rogue batch of E, a young girl, dead from an overdose, casually dumped at sea...

The Hollywood view of Gangland England has been too long focused on the East End - Snatch, Long Good Friday, Lock, Stock... when real Londoners know the East End's good for curry houses, and the gangsters headed out to the Home counties years ago.

Interesting to note that several comments in the reviews of this superlative film concerned the unintelligible accents. I should point out that viewers in the UK (and Holland and most Scandinavian countries) regularly enjoy American films without the aid of subtitles, so how come you find it so hard to understand us? :) We didn't complain that the cast of Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas had New York accents, so why complain that the Essex boys have Essex accents?