I've watched this movie four times, as it came with polarised 'recommendations'. 'Curate's egg' is the best that can be said about Gangster No. 1, and given the budget, actors and so on that's damning with feint praise. <br /><br />Around about the time this film was made, films about cockney geezer gangsters were all the rage. Some were really quite good (Lock Stock, Sexy Beast, Layer Cake) but many became parodies of the genre and were that all too common thing - the bad Brit flick. Gangster Number 1 was more of the latter. <br /><br />On paper this cast must have looked great. On celluloid, however it all comes apart. For a start, Malcolm McDowell, wonderfully sinister as Alex in A Clockwork Orange, cannot do a cockney accent and his performance is as frightening as a flower show. The voice over used to set up the piece becomes vaguely comic and quickly irritating. With a script this weak and an accent this bad, why on earth parade the fact? <br /><br />All this accentuates the film's central weakness. A truly creaky script. A world of Lennies, Eddies, Tommys and Freddies is just the start of a roster of every gangland cliché paraded with tiresome inevitability.<br /><br />When actors the calibre of David Thewlis and Paul Bettany look this corny, you know the problem's behind the camera. Director Paul McGuigan is developing a knack of producing 2nd-rate TV-style movies. Hopefully he'll get it right one day but after this, the Reckoning and now Lucky Number Slevin, I wouldn't hold my breath. <br /><br />Paul Bettany makes a fair fist of being scary but it requires scenes of sheer gore to get the point across. But the gore is just unpleasant and dissolves into Patrick Bateman without the laughs. In Scorsese's hands it might become terrifying, but McGuigan is no Scorsese, or Jonathan Glazer for that matter. In this gangsters' world, nobody possess genuine menace in the same way Ben Kingsley and Ian McShane were scary in Sexy Beast, or even Vinnie Jones in Lock Stock. Also, the supposedly stylish, rich Freddie Mays wears the same suit all the way through.<br /><br />The gay undertones just add to the corniness of the whole thing. <br /><br />There are some good perfromances here. Bettany is great in parts, but the 'look at my eyes' thing becomes tedious. Eddie Marsen as Eddie Miller is terrific as is Jamie Foreman as Lennie.