I’ve gotta say, this really impressed me. I’ve been terrible about keeping up with my reviews this past week and it reached the point on this one that I was thinking for the first half hour how ever I was going to come up with something to say about it, so little did I expect to enjoy it. I knew the basic story that it’s based on – that a bank robbery took an unexpected turn when the robbers came across compromising photographs of a Royal – and due to my prejudice against Jason Statham I really didn’t hold out a lot of hope for coming out of the movie much wiser.

Sure enough, at the 30 minute mark they are breaking into said bank – but it’s there that I began to notice one of the film’s biggest strengths. Though it felt like quite a meandering set-up to that “finally in the bank” moment, once there, it’s surprising how fast they seem to have got there and how fast things begin to happen that are at once unexpected and occasionally quite nasty. The screenplay is pure, no nonsense, procedural heist material but I feel like it does “the guilty” as they are called in the end credits “justice” for want of a better word. The Statham factor slips ever so slightly in an action sequence towards the end (I think him kicking a brick out of a wall to throw at someone was where I drew the line) but he’s actually mostly okay here. The look and feel is more timeless than perfect period recreation like “American Gangster” and the like, but it works. It’s a movie I’ll watch again for sure.

I guess my only worry about this movie is that it’s gonna tread on the heels of the slightly better The Lookout come Oscar time (that is to say, eek, next month – time flies …). It has a very similar feel to it, that’s for sure, but it’s great in completely different ways.

Without doubt, Philip Seymour-Hoffmann deserves an Oscar nomination. Like the guys in Rescue Dawn, I was intrigued at the start after all I’d read as to how relatively typical his work is; but by the end, you’ve witnessed an explosion, an actor genuinely pushing themselves to scary places. I also found the movie similar to Fargo, though I don’t know if that’s just the similar (though no less transfixing) Carter Burwell score talking.

With Sidney Lumet at the helm (just how many things are there here to get excited about?) I found myself trying to remember Family Business, too. Though you couldn’t ask for a better triple act than Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, and Hoffmann (not to mention Rose Harris as the mom of the family) – and Hoffmann is completely believable as Finney’s son – I couldn’t help thinking that the feeling of the characters being family there came over better (of course, Broderick as Connery’s grandson, now I think about it, is even harder to swallow, lol).

It’s a movie that I’ll come back to though, for sure. The opening is brilliant thanks to Lumet, the ending electrifying thanks to Hoffmann; the middle took some adjusting to, I let my attention slide and got momentarily lost, but I’m sure it’ll grow on me. I haven’t seen Find Me Guilty though I want to despite my obvious concerns about Vin Diesel doing serious … in fact, looking at his filmography, the last Lumet movie I saw was Night Falls on Manhattan which I don’t remember … which really kind of makes this movie less like a “return to form” than some kind of miracle. I get excited about Sidney Lumet still making movies because the guy made Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Serpico, and his book “Making Movies” plain makes you love the guy and want him to make movies like this all the time. I hope he’s got more of the same in him still.

This is one of my favourite recent British movies. I just read a review that compared Coogan’s Simon Garden to Inspector Clouseau – I’d never made that comparison before but it’s spot on… in fact, I’d personally say Coogan is funnier.

The Parole Officer borrows from a whole bundle of movies but comes out being better probably than any of them. All the characters are lovable in their own way and you really care about them in the end. There’s a whole load of hilarious scenes – from the rollercoaster to the art museum – and they all have great lines to go with them. They’re mostly very simple gags, but it’s Coogan that finds the freshness in them – even in the pre-credits sequence, when he falls off his chair, he does it in a way only Coogan can. If you listen to him on any of the DVD commentaries he’s done, he’s actually a fairly serious guy about comedy – he definitely is interested in the theory behind what works, and it really shows when he’s onscreen.

Finally Emma Williams – she’s hardly the star of the movie or a major character but I always notice her. A year or two following the movie she played Truly Scrumptious onstage in the West End “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and it’s always amazing to me how different she both looks and acts in this movie. She’s got a hell of an infectious smile and really lights up all the scenes she’s in… even the one she spends most of simply yelling, “Bollocks!” My personal favourite.