Essex Boys (2000)

You won't be disappointed!

Pretty Good

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The acting in this movie is really good.

Mafia movies are always somewhat confusing. They move very quickly, so it's hard to keep track of the timeline, and they introduce characters so quickly, that at times it's hard to keep track of who's who. Sometimes you have to watch a good mafia film a couple times, just so you can pick up on everything, but with Essex Boys, you'd be lucky to make it through the film just once. If the fast pace of the movie and large cast weren't confusing enough, add thick British accents to the mix, and it's hard to know what's going on. Sean Bean is a favorite of mine, especially when he's playing a bad guy, but there is so much back and fourth between different factions in this film, that I'm not so sure he was the bad guy. In fact, I'm not too sure of anything with this film. To me, Essex Boys was just one big confusing mix of gangsters double crossing and shooting at each other, the whole thing just didn't make a whole lot of sense at all. It really was a difficult film to watch and apparently, according to the other poor reviews, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Despite all that, not one, but two sequels have been made to this film. I am just bewildered by the whole thing, and my best advise is that even if you are the biggest mafia movie virtuoso in the world, this is a film you should definitely skip.

"Essex Boys" is a movie that starts in entirely familiar territory, and then abruptly shifts gears in the final act to give us twists that were unexpected and perhaps even incongruous. It's enough to make me wonder if some kind of jiggery pokery happened behind the scenes to the effect of: one writer was fired and another hired, or producers gave the screenwriter(s) carte blanche at the zero hour to branch off in an unfamiliar direction.The beginning is about a young man who gets involved with a criminal gang. One of its members, a psychopath played by Sean Bean, has just got out of gaol. "Billy Whizz", as they call the young man, impresses his new cronies but you know sooner or later it's going to be a tale of "you play with fire, you get burnt". I wasn't paying that much attention to these parts, to be honest. We've seen it all before, and it certainly offers nothing new.And then there's the gear change, with a truly surprising revelation, and the movie gets much darker, not only in dramatic tone, but in colour: most of the last part of the movie is shot at night. It ends with more twists that are impressive in the way they are thought out, if not entirely in the way they are implemented. The beginning and end feel like different movies; I would have liked to see the proper beginning and middle for the final act, rather than the impostors we ended up with.

I did like this movie, but - except for His Beanness - none of the actors really stood out. And, I don't know if I'm just a jaded child of the you-call-THAT-shocking?!? generation, but I was expecting the whole thing to be more over-the-top. Certain scenes worth note, though: the rape scene was awful, and the scene where he died was wicked cool. Not wicked cool in the ooh-cool-dead-people way, but in the wow-not-only-is-sean-bean-a-hottie-he-also-pulls-a-great-death-scene way.Sean Bean is really great in the way that he'll play any kind of character. He's done edgy homoerotic (way before it was trendy to do so), twitchy terrorist, seriously unhinged bad guy (several times, but it never gets old), devoted husband and lover...he's really diverse. I love that man.Sigh. Scuse me while I go chain smoke. And I don't even smoke!Trish

If you want to "see" what a drug induced blank look really looks like Sean Bean's bedroom scene half way through the movie is a must see. He ain't trying to look good or mean or anything other then just be in the character. And he does that to the exclusion of the rest of the world. He's a git and he will make your skin crawl.This an an ensemble cast and they fit together wonderfully. The ways they come together and come apart are believable. You may even feel compassion for some of them until you remember what everyone is doing.At the end of viewing it I thought it was a once through but now a few days later I want to see it again and I am thinking seriously about buying th DVD.