MOVIE REVIEW

'Sexy Beast' writers and some of its cast re-team for a story of bad guys behaving badly.

By BY ANDY KLEIN

A little less than a decade ago, director Jonathan Glazer and the screenwriting team of Louis Mellis and David Scinto wowed us with "Sexy Beast," the best British gangster film in at least a decade. Now Mellis and Scinto are back -- this time partnered with first-time director Malcolm Venville -- with "44 Inch Chest," another entry in the genre. "Sexy Beast" was a breakthrough role for star Ray Winstone, who again leads the cast; costar Ian McShane also returns.

The opening sequence consciously invokes the earlier film. "Sexy Beast" opened with Winstone lying at poolside in his Spanish villa, the very picture of the Aging Crook Living the Good Life, while the Stranglers' goofy "Peaches" played on the soundtrack. "44 Inch Chest" starts with Winstone lying in the rubble of his trashed living room, looking comatose -- the Aging Crook Living a Very Bad Life. This time the music is Nilsson's melodramatic version of "Without You."

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The song is almost all the exposition you need: Colin (Winstone) has just been abandoned by Liz (Joanne Whalley), his wife of 21 years, who is leav- ing him for a younger man. His mate Archie (Tom Wilkinson) is gently urging him to pull himself together. In their brute force world, that doesn't mean therapy; it means action, violence, revenge.

So Archie gets together with their other three mates -- crotchety Old Man Peanut (John Hurt); slick, (relatively) young Mal (Stephen Dillane); and suave, presumably better educated Meredith (McShane). They kidnap Liz's young lover (Melvil Poupaud) and throw him in a wardrobe that appears to be about 3-feet, 8-inches wide: hence the nonmetaphorical side of the title's meaning. But Colin -- tormented almost to the point of madness by his conflicted feelings -- can't quite decide whether to kill the guy.

With the exception of several flashbacks, most of the movie is confined to a single set -- the shabby, abandoned apartment where the five men debate the best course of action, amid reminiscences and remonstrations. (Meredith is upfront gay, which continually infuriates -- presumably has for years -- Old Man Peanut.)

Structurally, "44 Inch Chest" resembles "Reservoir Dogs"; but, without the added amusement of Tarantino's skewing of narrative time, it feels very much more like a direct adaptation of a stage play (which apparently it's not). The filmmakers do goose things up by playing with reality in the second half, but it all leads to a payoff that, while perfectly legitimate, feels limp.

Winstone gets a lot of monologues, and his accent -- East End, maybe? -- is so thick that he's sometimes incomprehensible (at least to my mid-Atlantic region American ears). As his musings increasingly dominate, the film seems to be straining for genuine tragedy, i.e., taking itself with an unearned degree of seriousness.

What keeps it watchable are the more comic performances from Hurt and McShane. The latter, in particular, is simply brilliant; he makes us chuckle with an eyebrow raised or slight turn of his head. Like the character he played in "Sexy Beast," McShane's Meredith is almost inhumanly cold; unlike that character, he's charming rather than terrifying.

BrandX@latimes.com