Lords of London (2014) Directed by Antonio Simoncini

What starts off as something very original and promising soon turns into something highly annoying and terrible.

Sure, this movie was totally different from what I expected it to be but that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I didn't like it. I expected a cheap, low-grade, British gangster flick but thing I got was a...well, it was something. There is no good way to describe this movie really but it's anything but a conventional movie, let alone a straightforward crime/gangster flick.

Reason why this movie is a hard one to describe is because the movie itself is a hard one to follow. It's told with tons of flashbacks and involves a whole bunch of, at first seemingly, unrelated characters and story lines, each set at different places and at different times as well. But even while the movie is confusingly told and the story comes across as something complicated, it's still pretty easy to see right through the movie. It's intentions are pretty obvious very early on already and it wasn't hard to see where the story was going to take the movie and how everything was going to tied together eventually and how the movie was going to end. In other words, it's actually a very simple and predictable story, that is disguised as a needlessly complicated and confusing one.

Because of its approach this never becomes a very pleasant movie to watch. Due to it's storytelling things tend to feel unbalanced unbalanced and without a good focus. It basically caused me to lose all of my interest and let me tell you, it was hard to sit through this movie, even though it luckily was only 90 minutes short.

Guess it's fair to say that this movie had some potential in it still. I mean, there are plenty of movies out there that attempt something similar but in fact do work out as something both compelling and pleasant to watch. "Cloud Atlas" is the best and most recent example that I can think of, though that's a movie as well that you either are going to absolutely love or hate.

And sure, it's always good to watch Ray Winstone, in basically everything. He also definitely was the highlight of the movie for me but still, it's hard to figure out why he even agreed to appear in this movie. It's not like it's anything high profile and it's not like Antonio Simoncini is a brilliant and highly respected and acclaimed director, that every actor would love to work with, regardless of what he's doing. As a matter of fact, this is Simoncini first directed movie and as far as I can tell, he had done absolutely nothing else movie related prior to this movie either.

Best thing I can say about it is that it's not a complete train-wreck but it still remains a movie that's highly unpleasant to watch and far from engaging.

4/10