A British thriller; A story about a London gangster who awakes in a remote town in Italy after a serious and life threatening altercation in a nightclub. He is forced to rediscover his past. The audience is always ahead of this slow moving story, which, plainly put, makes for laborious viewing. I did wonder if we were in for a remake of "Ghost" early on. Instead, a very predictable plot unfolds, and regular flashbacks don't assuage this feeling. Unfortunately, we just get more characters, some non-actors and a moribund backstory. The film wastes talent like Ray Winstone who is left to chew up the scenery to awful redundancy playing a ridiculous wastrel. We don't even get closure to the story either. The only characters we can get behind play a minor part. The soundtrack is conspicuously contrived, and of low-fi. The only thing going for it is the locations. Otherwise, it is a simple melodrama littered with foul-mouth dialogue, cynically packaged as a high octane gangster thriller.

Tony Lord (Glen Murphy) is lying in a pool of blood in the first scene. The next thing you know he is in Italy, covered with blood. He enters a small village which we quickly figure out is an existentialist setting. Tony meets Francesco (Giovanni Capalbo) the only man in the village that will talk to him. Francesco is concerned about his daughter (Serena Iansiti) running off with an Englishman (Christopher Hatherall) who is a bad seed. Tony has flashbacks to his own life both as a child and an adult. He sees the negativity in his life and must come to terms with the idea that his mother would have been better off had she stayed in Italy.

The film was boring. There wasn't much action, just low grade drama. It seemed that Tony couldn't recognize his own parents as youths which added to the confusion of the story. For those who expect to see a good crime drama need to look elsewhere. This is more like an art film by people who don't know how to do art films.

I caught this film on late night TV by chance, and it had quite an impact on me. Clearly, some of the other reviewers were looking for unstinting, hardcore violence. There is violence, but the menace is just as, if not more powerful.

Some scenes are quite grim and unsettling, while the contrast in the portrayal of relationships couldn't be more stark, to good effect.

The acting is believable and drew me in right up to the end. Yes, it was clear to me what was happening, but that's because I was watching a film. You wouldn't find it so easy to process if this was actually your life, which doesn't seem to have occurred to the film's detractors.

You need to have a bit of an imagination to appreciate this film. If you're only interested in torture and mayhem, look elsewhere.