Often, the mood of a crime drama can carry you through, and even past, a film’s weak elements. And sometimes it can make you wish the rest of the movie lived up to the bar set by its atmosphere.
“London Bouelvard” falls into the second category. Writer-director William Monahan — who wrote the Oscar-winning script for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” — seduces us with a low-rung British underworld in which bluesy tunes by the Yardbirds and the Box Tops fill the soundtrack and men all talk like Michael Caine, until the film goes down side streets and loses its way.
Colin Farrell is Mitchell, just paroled and newly employed as a handyman/enforcer for Charlotte (Keira Knightley), an actress besieged by paparazzi and tabloid reporters. Her reptilian manager-handler (a great, louche David Thewlis) keeps her urban mansion fortified against snoops, but she needs muscle for the public. A romance soon develops between Charlotte and Mitchell.
But then this movie of Ken Bruen’s novel gets bogged down in the usual two-bit gangster shenanigans. Ray Winstone is an all-too-familiar crime boss, and Ben Chaplin uglies it up as a shifty earner. Anna Friel is sadly forgettable as the woman who first aims Mitchell toward Charlotte.
Farrell and Knightley are nicely matched, two actors each rebounding from moderate career stumbles: Farrell has recaptured the flinty sneer he had a decade ago while incorporating a wounded machismo, and Knightley continues her welcome escape from period-set doldrums.
But “London Boulevard” would have been better as a grubbier, darker version of “Notting Hill” than as just another travelogue through flashy clubs and badly-carpeted basements and gun-wielding ex-con standoffs. Had the film stood still more often, its stylish gambit would have worked better.
Magic Moment: Farrell gets a tour through his new employer's mansion, picking up clues about her sad, sequestered life.