13 July 2000
Source: The Independent
Essex Boys (18)
Director: Terry Winsor
Starring: Sean Bean, Charlie Creed-Miles, Tom Wilkinson
A pronounced televisual pedigree is reinforced by the familiar
faces of a half-dozen character actors and a plot calculated to
wind up Middle England. Yet there's something interestingly rank
about the proceedings here, with Bean giving a strong turn as
the recently-released, embittered jailbird out to make up for
lost time in a morass of cockney geezers, shotguns and spiked
drugs. Just as the increasingly horrible British gangster revival
seems to offer no pleasures, director Winsor has come up with
a proper, modulated drama rather than an empty exercise in stylised
violence. * * *
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