Filth

Synopsis: Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) is an Edinburgh cop scheming for promotion to detective inspector. However, trying to cope with his marriage break-up by drowning himself in whiskey, cocaine and lots of sex, he’s doing less than putting his best foot forward.

You’ve really got to wonder at anyone who calls their film “Filth”. What kind of demographic are they aiming at? More of a turn-off than a turn-on one, would presume that it is meant with a good deal of black humour. Even so, this leaves only a fairly small audience share partial to such flights of wit.  If the film was a good one this could still amount to something over time. Sadly Jon S. Baird’s film is not good. It might have some laddish appeal for a would-be bad boys but for most it will simply be a waste of time.

Adapted by the director from a novel by Irvine Welsh who wrote "Trainspotting" which was turned into the biggest cult British film of the 1990s by Danny Boyle, Filth amply demonstrates the importance of the director in bringing a text to life on the screen. Boyle, who has since gone on to establish himself as one of Britain’s leading contemporary directors, delivered a film that was original, inventive, dynamic and hugely entertaining. Baird has managed to do pretty much entirely the opposite (two other post-Trainspotting Welsh adaptations, The Acid House and Ecstasy  also failed). Filth is a derivative try-hard attempt to be cultishly modish and comes off as a Scots version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant with a pop soundtrack.

From the cartoonish characterisations to the stock-standard mise-en-scène nothing about the film works as a psychological drama. From the outset Detective Sergeant Robertson is such an unlikeable character that no-one is going to be remotely interested in his personal problems and inevitable downfall. McAvoy, who made his reputation in tasteful costume dramas was no doubt looking for a change of pace (he has a producer credit) and gives it his all but to little effect. That he looks remarkably like a young Russell Crowe only makes one wish that Crowe had been given the part. He would have invested the film with much-needed conviction and might have even been able to save it from the overwhelming miasma of pointlessness that quickly overtakes it.  

Good and bad are to some extent matters of individual taste but in this case, believe me, Filth is not good.

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