There was a period in the Cool Britannia days when you couldn’t throw a brick at a cinema in the UK without hitting a British gangster movie with a castful full of dodgy geezers blagging their way around an underground scene full of drugs and farfetched capers. Some were ludicrously entertaining creations of actual working-class talent, such as Nick Love’s The Business, others transcended genre pigeonholing to work their way into various top critics’ lists (such as Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast), and still others were Guy Ritchie movies. There were hundreds of less high-profile efforts too, destined for VHS or DVD, but each having somehow found funding.
These days the British gangster flick is no longer flavour of the week, or month, and there’s something appealingly bullish about attempts to make these films now. Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire is exactly the sort of film that would struggle to find mainstream funding these days, but there’s something worth respecting about the evident hustle involved in making it. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of Henry Roman and his London crime empire, with a patchwork of vignettes showcasing the scrapes, crises and jobs gone wrong that make up the fabric of the lives of Roman and his associates. Enterprising marketing has gone all out to convince the unwary that the film stars John Hannah (Four Weddings and a Funeral), but his role is small; the star of the show is in fact multi-hyphenate Michael Head (as the eponymous Mr Roman), who also writes and directs.
Roman, his associates and their adventures feel very much like a tribute act playing the greatest hits of the genre. The only problem is that the act is more of a wedding band than anything else, with variable acting, even more variable comedy, and compromised technical work. Perhaps most disappointingly, the violence is almost wholly unconvincing; that’s one area where you really want this kind of film to go for it, but the pulled punches are the sort of thing you’d see on stage, and film is an unforgiving medium where this sort of sleight of hand is concerned. Points for effort, but without the energy that the genre is waiting for.
• Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire is in UK cinemas from 17 May, and on digital platforms from 10 June.
