Essex Boys * (2000, Sean Bean, Charlie Creed-Miles, Alex Kingston, Tom Wilkinson) – Classic Movie Review 1995

Co-writer- director Terri Winsor’s 2000 thriller stars Sean Bean, who plays, very unconvincingly, a violent Essex cabbie called Jason Locke, who falls on hard times and tries to make ends meet by becoming the personal driver for a gangster.

This nasty, brutish and shaky British gangster thriller has a flashy surface that doesn’t help its credibility gap at all, though the Essex location filming does. Despite its air of total movie fantasy, it’s based on a real-life English gangland killing that left three hoodlums dead in a snowy Essex lane. This all apparently happened, but it just couldn’t have been like this.

The Brit actors almost all seem very actory and theatrical for gangsters, and there’s something really wrong with a film if fine players like Tom Wilkinson (as John Dyke) are poor and unconvincing. Bean’s playing such a revolting character and there’s such a lot of sadistic violence that really don’t want to know. Charlie Creed-Miles comes off best as Billy Reynolds.

Alex Kingston, Larry Lamb, Gareth Milne, Amelia Lowdell, Michael McKell, Holly Davidson and Terence Rigby co-star.

The film is based loosely on notorious events that led to the murders of three drug dealers in Rettendon, Essex, on 6 December 1995. Known drug dealers Patrick Tate, Craig Rolfe and Tony Tucker were lured by the pretext of a lucrative drugs deal to Workhouse Lane, Rettendon, where they were killed with a shotgun while sitting in their Range Rover.

Grays Thurrock, Southend-on-Sea and Woolston Hall, Chigwell, are among the Essex locations. Winsor’s only other cinema movie as director is Party, Party (1983), though he also directed Bean in the 1992 TV movie Fool’s Gold: The Story of the Brink’s-Mat Robbery.

Bonded by Blood (2010), Essex Boys Retribution (2013) and The Fall of the Essex Boys (2013) revisit the story.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1995

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/