Shoot on Sight

Jag Mundhra’s honestly intentioned and interestingly cast (Brian Cox, Greta Scacchi, Om Puri) but simplistic and crudely directed drama is ‘inspired’ by the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. Its reconstruction-style opening – depicting the gunning down by police of a British Muslim on a tube platform – seems to suggest the beginnings of one of those lightly fictionalised dramas that offers some sort of new political spin on events.

Even if that was the filmmakers’ intention, it’s swiftly scuppered as the film broadens out into an examination of the professional and domestic crisis surrounding the senior Muslim police commander entrusted with the internal police enquiry, and finally into a conventional  thriller drowning in a morass of contrived plot dynamics, shoe-horned-in speeches and under-powered set-pieces.