The story was a little OTT, but man... that was an entertaining thriller. The characters in this were probably less realistically portrayed than those of This Is England, the other Shane Meadows' film I've seen (and on the same day, directly before watching this); they felt more like "film" characters, including Considine as Richard, but the way it was filmed made it feel like it could've been real. If that makes sense...

I don't mean to say they weren't well written characters, by the way. Nor that Richard wasn't a very deep character, because he was. What starts off as just seeming like a regular revenge story actually gets more and more involved and very subtly expands on little details to turn them into these epic "oh wow" moments, Richard's character being the focal point of these developments.

I don't want to say too much about Richard's brother Anthony, but without spoiling anything, I didn't really see it going quite exactly the way it did... The speech that Richard delivers near the end of the film though is just awesome, as is his little altercation with the gangster, Sonny, "you're fucking there mate" -- Spine tingling stuff.

It has a strange mix of comedy and grimness too, a bit of tragedy, a bit sinister, a bit fantastic.. but very dark, very gritty, and very, very good.