Atmospheric post-noir film of the London underworld that never amounts to much of anything.

Next time Mike Hodges wants to make a movie, I would suggest he shoot it in total darkness and drop the dialogue.

[S]trip[s] the mobster film down to its bare essentials, and the result is stark and relentless...

Ace noir title, OK noir movie.

...a kind of inside-out noir, a stately film about the sad progress of a diminished and sad but still frightful and dangerous monster.

Hodges and Preston have a commendable attitude, but with the thin story and shallow characters, even the right idea doesn't seem as interesting as it should be.

Predictable to a fault.

... Hodges is the kind of director who can breathe new life into old material with an offhand, deceptively minimalist approach.

Too often sleepwalks to its inevitable finish.

In the end, it is the complex aura surrounding Owen's character...that stay with the viewer long after the threads of the story have unraveled in one's mind.