44 Inch Chest

It’s not very often I leave the cinema thinking “I could have been doing anything else, but watching that”. 44 Inch Chest made me feel that way.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Man (Ray Winstone) finds out wife is being unfaithful, kidnaps the guy who she was with, threatens him a bit along with his mates and then goes mad. Or something. I’m not sure.

I had some time to kill on the way home today (by flipping bus, but that’s another story) and this was the only film on at a convenient time. Given that it’s by the same writers as Sexy Beast I was looking forward to it. However, the only things it has in common with that masterpiece are Ray Winstone and a ton of swearing.

The premise is very simple. The settings are simple. The acting is fantastic (John Hurt is wonderful, and Ian McShane as the dodgy poof is perfect). Overall, though, it’s ultimately empty. Around halfway through it just goes a little over the edge and the ending is simply awful. I sat for about two minutes of the credits convinced it was a “false” ending and that there had to be more coming up.

Wrong.

I left the cinema feeling bewildered and somewhat cheated. There is nothing in this chest worth seeing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Movie Review | ’44 Inch Chest’: He’s Older and a Cuckold, but He Has Tough Friends (movies.nytimes.com)
• Weekend Movie Guide: 44 Inch Chest! (laist.com)
• Review: 44 Inch Chest (cinematical.com)
• 44 Inch Chest reviewed. (slate.com)
• 44 Inch Chest, review (telegraph.co.uk)

The 44 Inch Chest by Mosher'sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.