No one could accuse Gary Love's London-set psychological thriller of owing anything to faux cockney entertainments such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Based on Dominic Leyton's play Collison, it ventures into territory few British films care to go. The setting is a rundown council estate where besuited and middle-class Tom (Steven Mackintosh) goes to meet black crackhead D (Ashley Walters).

He is willing to pay good money for a revolver D possesses and, since his wife and child have just left him, something violent is clearly afoot. But D has stolen the revolver from Hoodwink (Andy Serkis), the brutish and rage-ridden local kingpin who is now chasing him down. When the sad-sack trio meet up, there is hell to pay.

Love's film, which makes kitchen sink drama seem genteel, is directed with some flair but suffers, as did the play, from a kind of highly coloured melodrama that pays decreasing dividends.

Mackintosh and Walters produce portraits of desperation that take considerable courage to accomplish, although Serkis is a bit of a caricature as the tattooed monster pursuing them. The estate itself and its denizens are painted with the kind of flourish that often seems frighteningly real.

However, the film, in the end, looks very much like an adaptation of one of those preachy plays that tries too hard to tell it like it is among the underclass.