Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Jackdaw

JACKDAW
Directed by Jamie Childs
Certificate: 15
☆☆

IT is very hard to take British gangster films seriously anymore. Gone are the days of The Long Good Friday or Get Carter. Instead, they seem to be inhabited today by macho-damaged soap stars who walk into trouble because they are too stupid to know their right from their left.

Jackdaw swings from gruff gangster clichés and unfathomable plot jerks to moments of sublime comedy that make you question whether the grunting script is a double-negative joke.

Our hero is Jack Dawson (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who we learn has recently been demobbed. Before a soldier, he had been both a motocross champion and a runner for organised crime.

He has returned and needs some quick money. When an associate asks him to paddle into the North Sea and collect a package, he thinks it is a quick score. But poor Jack has been double-crossed, and when he gets home, he discovers his brother Simon (Leon Harrap) has disappeared – and the owner of the package is behind it.

This North-East world is a post-Thatcher hellscape, with fog horns rumbling and gas flares lighting up a dark sky. For a film with a limited budget, the deprivation of our broken country has provided both a forlorn background for the story and locations to illustrate it.

Jackdaw is as freezing as a plunge in the North Sea in December. The harrowing decline of an industrial area is marked by abandoned bingo halls for baddies to squat in as they manage their drug empires.

There is a psychological mist that descends over British cinema-goers when it comes to gangster action flicks. Shoot hoodlums in the USA and no matter what accent they have, we are subconsciously trained to accept it. Transfer the action and we hoot outrageously at the Mockney bad boys beloved of Guy Ritchie.

Jackdaw suffers from this, with a monosyllabic script pointing out the obvious, and characters that make no sense at all.

But all this is forgiven when Craig (Thomas Turgoose) appears. Thursgood is a brilliant actor, he can single-handedly change the atmosphere with one sentence, his talent for delivery covers up wonky continuity and script wobbles. A saving grace.