Tone, Bear and John are three hard men in the employee of London underworld boss Pops Den. They are collectors of money, threateners of people and removers of competition. However, with the birth of his first child, Tone decides that he has had enough and that he needs to turn his life around, starting with getting out of the life. When Bear tells Pops this, he orders them to kill Tone and bring him his severed hand by nine o'clock the next morning.
It is to be expected that, when one genre suddenly spawns a bit film, that many others will jump on the bandwagon - some being good and some being rubbish. We saw it with Scream when it relaunched the teen horror genre and spawned a tonne of copies. So it was no surprise to anyone (even if it was still depressing) that the success of a few British cockney gangster films with dark comedy spawned a raft of copies - most of which were average at best and ended up flopping.
Hard Men is one of these films and it deserved every penny it failed to get at the box office. The plot is almost none existent and centres on one night in the lives of these three. It would better if the events in the lives of the characters had mattered or been engaging but, because they aren't, then the plot just falls to pieces (not that it was ever really together). Instead it seems to revel in the grim of it's characters - but doesn't have the decency to make them people. One scene sees a prostitute talk about her years of abuse, but even that is just a scene to add shock value rather than depth. The film even has the nerve to look back fondly to the days of `civilised' gangsters (giving a cameo to Frankie Fraser for that reason) as if all the violence on display here is in some way admirable or a curiosity.
The cast are roundly bad but it is not really their fault - they simply have no material to work with. The cameo for a violent criminal is just pure bad taste and adds nothing to the film. As director and writer Amalou seems to have just fluked his way into the job on the basis of seeing better films and ripping them off. Certainly he brings no wit or style to his script even if his direction is actually quite good considering the budget he had to work with.
Overall this is a very poor film that will only appeal to fans of the genre - all others need to avoid it. I was surprised by just how rough I found the whole thing was - it lacked originality, revelled in uninvolving and seemed under the impression that the word `f*ck' is the height of clever writing.
