Man Dancin'

Jimmy Kerrigan (Ferns) returns to his drear windswept Glasgow council estate after nine years in a Northern Irish jail for gun-running. He's determined to go straight, but prospects look poor even before he puts his key in the door. He 'takes a slapping' for his crack-head younger brother and swiftly attracts the eye of his former gangland boss Donnie (Cosmo). At first, Donnie and bent cop 'Pancho' Villers (Cranham) think Jimmy's reform is a feint to disguise personal ambition. But their shared desire to curtail his existence is stoked by the turncoat's conversion of an am-dram group into a 'Stop the Rot' anti-crime organisation that threatens to politicise the locals. Ferns negotiates this morass with integrity intact. Some of his wry double-takes testify to the director's occasionalsuccess in modulating the film's otherwise resolutely solemn tone. Ferns' performance and the location work aside, the movie is dismally unconvincing.