Ben Kingsley is cast as a hitman again, presumably purely for his utterly terrifying gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast, only this time it's all played out for fun. The joke is that he can't keep off the sauce long enough to carry out his mob hits, and so gets shipped out unwillingly to attend AA meetings.
This scenario is such fertile soil for pitch-black humour that quite a while passes in anticipation before the realisation dawns that the writing is just too leaden to exploit all its possibilities. Kingsley wrings out what he can, but as his character's been gifted with no interesting personality traits apart from a disconcertingly po-faced directness, it's an uphill struggle.
Dahl spent a large part of the '90s revitalising the hard-edged film noir genre with lean minor classics such as The Last Seduction. Based on this bastard hybrid with comedy, he'd be best off going back there again. The love interest here makes no sense and it's hard to care who gets popped by the end. In a cinematic culture now completely inured to the actual horror of killing, the business of shooting people is just an incidental back story. So why have it at all?
4/10
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