Roshan Seth

After the latest incarnation of Dredd, director Pete Travis shifts gears drastically for this complex noir mystery set in multiracial London. It's a stylishly made film, anchored by another superbly involving performance by Riz Ahmed. But its low budget shows in the way it strains to obscure secrets in blurry flashbacks, using intriguing characters to create a lot of atmosphere while neglecting to properly tell the story.

It's set in London's northwest inner-suburbs, where Tommy (Ahmed) grew up. He lives with his feisty but ill father (Roshan Seth) and works as a private detective. His latest client is the high-class hooker Melody (Cush Jumbo), who is concerned because one of her colleagues has gone missing. As he looks for her, Tommy discovers the dead body of a prominent businessman who has a link to his childhood friend Haafiz (James Floyd), now a high-flying property developer. And things are getting increasingly messy, with American spies prowling around and a local Muslim brotherhood entangled in the case. Tommy hires a sparky neighbour (Damson Idris) to help him, and then he runs into his childhood sweetheart Shelley (Billie Piper), who brings up emotions he thought he'd left behind.

All of this is intercut with blurred flashbacks of Tommy, Haafiz and Shelley when they were 17 years old. This stirs in some intriguing emotions, even if the scenes feel like a distraction since they take so long to reveal their secrets and never quite connect with the central mystery. Travis keeps the tone warm and dense, with dark colours, emotive faces and Tommy's probing voiceover, all of which creates a vivid sense of atmosphere. On the other hand, the plot merely gets more knotted as it goes along, bringing in more people and themes. So even if the story never quite ties up all of its lose ends, at least it's a fascinating portrayal of the ethnic mix in most London neighbourhoods.

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When her father loses his livelihood in a traffic accident, Trishna (Pinto) needs to support her family in Rajasthan. So she takes a job offered by flirty tourist Jay (Ahmed), who works at his father's hotel in Jaipur. When Jay pushes their relationship further, Trishna runs home. But Jay finds her and talks her into moving with him to Mumbai, where they can live together while he pursues his dream of being a film producer. And as he becomes more distant, Trishna wonders if she's made a terrible mistake.

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Taking place a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark, Doom is the first movie chronologically in the trilogy. That means no Nazis, and unfortunately that means the stakes are at an all-time low. Indy isn't out to save the world this time; he's just saving a small Indian village... and his own ass, of course. There's also no Jewish/Christian mythology to deal with, which makes for an interesting change of pace but lowers the stakes and the intrigue considerably. Instead we have some magic rocks, some enslaved and starving kids, and an ancient cult quietly sacrificing people in an underground pool of lava. Hell, if Indy hadn't stumbled upon the scene, no one would have ever been the wiser.

Continue reading: Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom Review