FILM REVIEW: Welcome To The Punch (15)

For more than a decade, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels has spawned an array of home-grown crime thrillers awash with dodgy geezers, graphic violence and Cock-er-ney rhyming slang.

If the recent big screen version of The Sweeney and now Eran Creevy’s heavily stylised Welcome To The Punch are any indication, the wheeling and dealing is moving into Docklands.

The glimmering skyscrapers, strip-lit office blocks and swish riverside apartments of Canary Wharf, which served as a backdrop to Regan and Carter’s investigation last year, provide an equally stunning setting for this high-stakes game of cat and mouse involving a tenacious police officer and an elusive criminal.

Creevy’s script arms the characters with snappy one-liners that have become a staple of the genre - “The decision’s bad”; “And so’s your attitude!” - but he settles most arguments with a fist- or gunfight. Preferably both.

Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) is an inexperienced yet ambitious detective, who attempts to single-handedly take down notorious criminal Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).

Disobeying orders, Max chases after Jacob without any back-up and is shot in the leg.

Three years later, the gung-ho battle-scarred detective is gifted a chance at redemption.