Hodges still has style, and it's a canny idea for him to reunite with Owen, the star of his terrific last film, Croupier. But this is a mess: the backstory is non-existent, the villain (Malcolm McDowell) has no motive and the actors all sound like they're speaking lines. And how can a film feature a male rape, a beating and a suicide, all within the first half-hour, yet remain inert? Owen does strong-and-silent very well, but the surrounding Cockney grates against his rounded vowels - except when he slouches off to Charlotte Rampling's posh eaterie, where their oblique conversations do nothing to explain such fundamental mysteries as who she is and whether her relations with him are maternal, sexual or entirely defunct. I'm prepared to believe that Hodges made an intelligent film that was cruelly cut but, if so, the snips were certainly in all the wrong places.