London Fields Review: A Woman, Three Men and One Massive Turd of a Movie

The history of movies is littered with absolutely god-awful adaptations of great novels and whether you consider Martin Amiss 1990 book London Fields a great novel or simple one of the authors stronger works is a matter to be settled between you and your respective deity. But the lauded British authors tale of a world torn asunder, a woman who knows the details of her grisly future death and a writer mining it all for material was, if nothing else, a compelling read all literary bad-boy swagger (U.K. division) and whistling past the premillennial-tension graveyard. A man might pore through its pages, peruse the descriptive sentences of doomed females, toxic males, murder, class warfare and darts, and think there was the basis for something incredibly cinematic lurking between the lines. A man might very well be wrong.

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We can idly wonder what would have happened if David Cronenberg had gone through with his proposed take on the book back in the early aughts, or if Hell or High Waters David Mackenzie had his crack at it, or if some of the other directors attached to it over the years were able to bring their vision to the screen. Such daydreaming would be preferable to enduring what did end up slouching into theaters after numerous delays and Voodoo curses a sort of lads-mag take on 20th-century nihilism chic that reduces the novelists black satire into a clammy, panting Amis-and-randy mishigas. The images are in focus (mostly), so it earns half a star. Who says charity is an outdated concept?

Meet Samson Young (Billy Bob Thornton), an American pulp writer whos swapped his Hells Kitchen apartment for the London flat of a highly successful lit-celeb named Mark Asprey. (Why would an author give himself one unflattering avatar when he could gift himself with two?) Hes arrived in an Old Blighty roiled with riots and urban strife, in addition to being stocked with clichd caricatures that read broad on the page and have been upgraded to atom-bomb subtle here. On the Cockney punter side: Keith Talent (Jim Sturgess), pub Lothario and would-be darts champion. On the posh upper-cruster side: Guy Clinch (Divergents Theo James), rich banker and emasculated wanker. The person connecting all of them is Nicola Six (Amber Heard), a young woman who knows that one of these men will inevitably kill her, if the constant blare of Eighties Skinemax saxophones that grace the soundtrack doesnt first.

Thanks to its oddball coupling of dystopic flourishes, outr scenes of sex and violence and dissections of madonna/whore complexes that seem contradictory at best, many thought London Fields was virtually unadaptable. If director Matthew Cullen and his cast prove anything, its that you can turn any book into a movie if you have no problem with killing the host in the process. But an inability to translate Amiss voice is the least of its multitude of failures. Nothing works. Not poor Thorntons attempts to deliver bruise-purple voiceovers. Not Sturgesss working-class scummery, in a performance pitched somewhere between Kabuki theater and a conniption fit. Not the assumption that dressing Johnny Depp up as a scarfaced Tim Burton-ish grotesque with a hunger for scenery will shock some life into the proceedings. And certainly not forcing Amber Heard to become a walking, talking, vamping pin-up, ogled by the camera like it was a horny college freshman. Her Nicola is supposed to be Death, destroyer of worlds. Instead, shes turned into the human equivalent of a close-up of slightly parted lips.

We have not yet mentioned the sequence involving Minecraft-like blockheads doing a barbershop-quartet singalong about the cosmos, or Sturgess redoing Singin in the Rains title dance number to the sound of Money for Nothing, or Heard in a sexy-cop costume possibly sodomizing someone with a nightstick, because all of this sounds much cooler and outrageous than it actually is. Nor have we brought up the wink-nudge suggestions that its all in the writers head, because meta-textualizing doesnt suit this film any more than applying traditional notions of quality to it. This London Fields is nothing but fallow ground. Or, to apply the metaphor that Thorntons scribe gives to Heards sexed-up temptress when he first meets her, its a black hole something that sucks talent, taste, light, energy and matter into maw and leaves everything stranded in a void.