Love, Honour and Obey [DVD] [2000]

It must have seemed like fun at the time: a group of mates got together to play gangsters, ran around London's streets waving guns, dishing out beatings and shouting profanities at the top of their mockney lungs. It's the kind of game that any group of lads with a camcorder and a six-pack might indulge in on a Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, these particular mates happen to be famous, so the result--Love, Honour and Obey--actually saw the dark of cinemas.

Ray Winstone is Ray, head honcho of a North London crime outfit; Sean Pertwee is Sean, leader of the South London pack. Their organisations co-exist with a minimum of fuss, based on respect for each other's turf. Then Ray's nephew, Jude (Jude Law), introduces his mate, Jonny (Jonny Lee Miller), into the firm and the equilibrium goes up in gun smoke. Jonny's a hothead who disrespects Ray's rules and instigates a private feud with Matthew (Rhys Ifans), his opposite number in Sean's gang, and soon there are gun battles raging through the capital.

Perhaps directors Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis regard their work as avant-garde, a deconstruction of the movie-making myth or a dissection of genre--or maybe they are just having a laugh at our expense. Either way the result is tortuous, egotistical film making. To be fair, Love, Honour and Obey is at least a step up from their last effort, Final Cut, in which much the same cast again paraded under their own names and made utter fools of themselves, but that's like saying the Zeebrugge ferry disaster wasn't as bad as the Titanic. Still, at least it's not all boys playing with their penis extensions: there's also Sadie Frost and Denise Van Outen. --Jamie Graham