A strict script editor might have helped. Somewhere inside this baggy, macho, sloppily violent, visually uninteresting British film is a sharp black comedy struggling to get out. Salah (Ziad Abaza) is a smart young Turkish-British guy about to graduate with a politics degree, heading for a brilliant career. With nothing left to do but fine tune his final dissertation, Salah comes to help his ailing father Zaki (Nayef Rashed) who runs a late-night kebab place in a south coast seaside town – and he’s horrified at the way aggressive drunks terrorise his dad, and at the way public drunkenness has been created by a huge club, run by a cynical and sinister promoter called Jason Brown (Scot Williams). A grisly event leaves Salah in charge of the kebab shop, and soon he is using it as a base to wage vigilante war against the parasitic forces of darkness. Sweeney Todd meets Charles Bronson? It’s an interesting idea, and there’s a nice visual gag involving Henry Kissinger. But there is no focus, it runs out of ideas, and we get endless ambient shots of people getting drunk in the streets. It sags – which is a shame.
