A good film on several levels. The unflattering comparisons that some critics have made between it and The Usual Suspects are completely misguided as directorial intent and effect in the two pictures are dissimilar. Winsor's film, it seems to me, brilliantly evokes both the drabness and cruelty of the criminal mindset. It does this partly through the choice of dull, flat Essex landscapes with their coastal marshes, grey motorway links, flash nouveau riche mansions and the tawdry glamour of seafront locations. The characters are both repellent and yet curiously mesmerising. This is not a film in which it is easy to lose interest. Nobody can do psycho-thug better than Sean Bean, and Charlie Creed-Miles has created a dangerously weak character as Billy, whom it is almost possible to feel sorry for without actually liking. The film is very well lit, though I did find sound levels a little dodgy at times It's a film that, despite critics' comments, is not a million miles from Get Carter in quality.

"Essex Boys" is a movie that starts in entirely familiar territory, and then abruptly shifts gears in the final act to give us twists that were unexpected and perhaps even incongruous. It's enough to make me wonder if some kind of jiggery pokery happened behind the scenes to the effect of: one writer was fired and another hired, or producers gave the screenwriter(s) carte blanche at the zero hour to branch off in an unfamiliar direction.

The beginning is about a young man who gets involved with a criminal gang. One of its members, a psychopath played by Sean Bean, has just got out of gaol. "Billy Whizz", as they call the young man, impresses his new cronies but you know sooner or later it's going to be a tale of "you play with fire, you get burnt". I wasn't paying that much attention to these parts, to be honest. We've seen it all before, and it certainly offers nothing new.

And then there's the gear change, with a truly surprising revelation, and the movie gets much darker, not only in dramatic tone, but in colour: most of the last part of the movie is shot at night. It ends with more twists that are impressive in the way they are thought out, if not entirely in the way they are implemented. The beginning and end feel like different movies; I would have liked to see the proper beginning and middle for the final act, rather than the impostors we ended up with.

This abrasive British gangster movie set in Essex, a county due east of London, thrives on double-crosses galore. None of the underworld characters are role models, much less noble individuals, and they live to ascend to the top of their rackets over anybody's dead body. No, the English accents are not thatthick, but you may find it difficult to make it through this thoroughly unsavory crime thriller. Everybody is prepared to kill, kill, kill and the rugged life of British mobsters is short-lived. Incidentally, the British police loiter on the edges of the action. Ostensibly, the story is told by an enterprising but harmless cabdriver named Billy Reynolds (Charlie Creed-Miles) who gets mixed with with ex-convicts Jason Locke (Sean Bean of "GoldenEye") and John Dyke (Tom Wilkinson of "Rush Hour") who operate in the cutthroat narcotics smuggling business. They specialize in Ecstacy, or what they refer to as 'spotted pills' and a bad shipment threatens to undo the partnership between Locke and Dyke. Locke mistreats his wife, Lisa Locke (Alex Kingston of NBC-TV's "ER")with casual abandon and openly has sex with any tart to whom he takes a fancy. When she catches him giving it to another woman, she goes ballistic and howls about how she maintained her loyality to him by abstaining from sex during the five years he spent in prison. He reminds her that he does as it likes and them publicly humiliates her and sends her groveling to her knees in front of everybody. As we learn later on, Lisa is a woman not to be scorned.

Director Terry Winsor and scenarist Jeff Pope based this 102-minute, R-rated thriller on the notorious Rettendon Range Rover Murders," where authorities discovered three gangsters gunned down and left for dead shot in a Range Rover during one snowy evening. Billy proves his worth as a driver and Dyke loans him to loose cannon hood Jason Locke who has no qualms about throwing people out of windows or strangling uncooperative girls that refuse to let him have his way with them. Action develops gradually with less characters winning in the end over the crazed Locke. Winsor handles things nicely enough and the ending is truly a revelation along with Alex Kingston's role as Locke's wife. Not as charismatic as "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" or for that matter any of the other Guy Ritchie crime melodramas. Humor is singularly lacking in this no-nonsense outing. The moral is obvious: do not associate with shady characters who use guns to settle their arguments and are forever paranoid about witnesses to the massacres they have seen.