New Town Killers

Continuing his steep slide from the heights of 2002’s autobiographical ‘16 Years of Alcohol’, director Richard Jobson attempts a self-penned, Edinburgh-set, ordeal-chase thriller that’s as unedifying as it is incredible. Dougray Scott is one half of a pair of leather-gloved, Maserati-driving mystery hard men (pretentiously named Alistair Raskolnikov) who embroil a poor Leith roughneck (played by James Anthony Pearson, personable) in a lethal game of hide-and-seek, which involves a kaleidoscope of hand-held, widescreen chase sequences through every avenue and alley of new and Auld Reekie.

As a thriller, it’s under-characterised, implausible, humourless and unpleasantly violent – rich banker Raskolnikov displays Leopold-and-Loeb levels of murderous social superiority in his addiction to face-stamping his inferiors. As a Jobson movie, it’s worse: occasional flashes of brilliance merely bear testimony to how the director has squandered his innovative eye, social nous, sense of rock-fuelled kinetic immediacy and gift for location on a seemingly self-mocking jumble of sour literary, cinematic, class and genre affectations.