3/10
Ten years ago, Justin Kerrigan made Human Traffic, which was a minor success. Two years ago, he made this film, and only now is it getting a limited release. I can see why.
While it is broadly speaking true to say that anything with Robert Carlyle in is worth watching, this is an exception to that rule. He plays the single father of a boy, living in South Wales in the late 80s. Charlie (the father) leads what appears to be the life of a secret agent, to his son at least. But it's clear from the outset that this is an implausible explanation for his behaviour, which becomes increasingly erratic as the film goes on. The only question is, what happened to Charlie to make him this way? And frankly, the explanation that we get at the end of the film makes no sense whatsoever. It's like an unfunny punch line to a long and tedious joke.
Father and son are well played, but they operate in a kind of vacuum, with virtually no other characters in sight, and the film appears to have been made on a tiny budget. Which would have been fine if it had had a strong script to keep us enthralled. It doesn't.
