London Boulevard (2010)

London Boulevard arrives from 2010, a year when a British crime thriller could still be assembled from spare parts and released without apology. William Monahan, making his directorial debut from Ken Bruen's novel, gives us Colin Farrell as an ex-convict, Keira Knightley as a reclusive actress, and Ray Winstone as the gangster who will eventually ruin everything. The film is stylish, bleak, and entirely uninterested in instructing us. It has no thesis. It has a body count.

What it does have is a collection of people behaving badly toward one another. Women here are victims, girlfriends, or corpses, and the film never pauses to interrogate that arrangement. The one gay character is a predator, a stereotype the film deploys without a second thought. A black man is shot in a garage because of a mistaken identity, and the moment passes without commentary. Jordan, the agoraphobic business manager, is played for eccentric charm, his condition a personality trait and nothing more. Sanjeev Bhaskar appears as a doctor courting the protagonist's sister, and his presence registers as casting, not as a statement.

This is a film that trusts its audience to watch violence and draw no civic lesson from it. The paparazzi swarm outside the gates, the corrupt detective takes his envelope, the footballers beat a homeless man to death, and nobody stands up to deliver a speech about the way things ought to be. Monahan is content to let the whole thing curdle into noir. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a knife, and by the final scene the knife is in the protagonist's side. For those of us who catalogue such things, the absence of any contemporary sermonizing is almost restful. Almost.