It’s a fackin’ cockney crime caper, you cunt.
Sirus is a part-time cabbie controller, part-time heroin courier, and a full-time happy chappie. He’s therefore blissfully ignorant as he walks into the old bill’s trap to smash the drug ring. But the psychopathic detective that’s after him doesn’t just want him arrested – he wants his dosh, drugs and dead body, and he’s not above employing a gang of Russian goons to do his dirty work. Fortunately, Sirus has some handy mates too: a pair of Welsh-Jamaican heavies with enough weaponry to wage war on a small country.
It’s safe to say that what follows is a load of old cobblers – a dumb-as-fuck rummage through Guy Ritchie’s bins, complete with wide-boys and wannabe gangsters, freeze frames with voiceover, and a score that may as well be called Now That’s What I Call Pub Rock ’99!
The action is static – confined to a single warehouse – which is fine if Tarantino is writing your dialogue, but the script from first-timer Thorin Seex is painfully lacklustre. Attempts at comedy are cringingly immature, largely revolving around racial stereotypes and swearing.
While not in the slightest bit original, Nathanael Wiseman’s Sirus isn’t entirely unwatchable as he flounders around in his new-found thug life like a bewildered Karl Pilkington. He also delivers the film’s only genuine and honest scene with casual sincerity. After reflecting on the night’s activities and his own heroin use, he asks the audience ‘What’s the moral of the story?’ and then answers for us: ‘You’re asking the wrong person.’ While there is one stylistic nod to (or blag from) Requiem for a Dream, there’s no such hand-wringing here. Instead, the film leaves a moral void that reflects Sirus’ apathetic attitude to his drug addiction, and perhaps the attitude of society at large.
Unfortunately, this brief moment can’t stop Hackney’s Finest being the kind of Lock, Stock knock-off you’d expect to see being flogged out of a suitcase on a street corner.
HACKNEY’S FINEST is out now on DVD
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