Review of Complicity

Introduction

Produced in part from a generous National Lottery grant, ‘Complicity’ is a pretty bog-standard British thriller (from the novel by Iain Banks) made watchable by an appealing cast who, to a certain extent, manage to overcome the uninspired direction of ‘veteran’ Gavin Millar and the over-stuffed screen adaptation by Bryan Eisley. This is competent, business as usual, but distinctly half-baked.

Video

Horribly shot like a ‘gritty’ BBC mini-series, the DVD transfer is hardly anything to get the juices flowing. Given the source material though, its sufficient enough. And at least its anamorphic.

Audio

Run of the mill sound transfer. The layers of music, dialogue and background sound in some scenes are coped with reasonably well, but the badly recorded live-audio is often shoddy.

Features

The trailer, of course, making badly edited use of the film’s plethora of sex and violence. The ‘Making of’ documentary is better, and a shade above the usual featurette we’ve come to expect from Entertainment in Video. Interviews with the principle cast and crew shed plenty of light on the proceedings, the location filming and the attraction of Bank’s novel. Strangely, there are no subtitles to tell us who is who, so I suppose you’ll just have venture an educated guess.

Conclusion

‘Trainspotting’s Jonny Lee Miller plays leftist journalist Cameron Colley, a lapsed political idealist and proprietor of more than a few skeletons in the closet. Cameron’s incendiary editorial material has gained the approval of a demented serial killer who feels a mysterious compunction to inform our hero of his murderous acts. A connection which DCI McDunn (Brian Cox) finds most suspicious. Soon, Cameron finds himself in more than a little hot water with the police, and the killer. Throw into this mix a healthy spot of kinky sex with married hussy Yvonne (Keeley Hawes), her Bourgeois husband William (Jason Hetherington) and an old friend (Paul Higgins) who turns up unexpectedly.

The main trouble here is the same with most adaptations of sprawling crime novels: consolidation. There are a million unresolved, barely even glanced over plot-strands in ‘Complicity’ with the central murder mystery narrative itself taking back-seat over some nostalgic flashbacks of better times. Characters are left floating in the air, dramatic tension ignored almost entirely. Eisley and Millar fail to dilute the dense plotting of the novel and end up with a somewhat fragmented and certainly slight tale of betrayal, responsibility and justice. Also, any moral significance we could derive from Bank’s novel has been completely washed away in favor of gratuitous bouts of sex, drug abuse and gory violence. Lending the trite fraternalism of the conclusion an even more pretentious air of dissatisfaction.

That said, as badly written as his character is, Jonny Lee Miller comes into his own as Cameron, and Cox and Higgins offer capable performances in memorable supporting roles. Sadly, Gavin Millar’s direction wreaks of Michael Winner, paint-by-number banality, failing to lend the film the air of tension and menace that it so desperately needs. Add to this a drawl, pointless voice-over (has there even been an adaptation of a novel without one?) and a truly risible role for the beautiful Kelley Hawes. ‘Complicity’ is far from the worst British film ever made, however even given the endless supply of detritus we seem to be producing of late, it doesn’t do a huge amount to turn the tide.