The Liability – review

Watching on mobile? See the trailer here

The hit man has been a recognisable figure in our dramatic literature since at least the time Richard III and Macbeth hired anonymous murderers to do their dirty work, though the actual term didn't become widely used outside the American underworld until the 1960s. There are now so many around that they take in apprentices, especially when they start ageing. In serious Hollywood thriller The Mechanic (1972), hitman Charles Bronson offers informal indentures to Jan-Michael Vincent, as does Jean Rochefort to Guillaume Depardieu in the French comedy Wild Target (1993). A tradition of sorts is now developing. In Stephen Frears's The Hit (1984), dead-keen pupil Tim Roth is taken on as assistant to jaded hitman John Hurt, Thirty years later, in The Liability, Roth has become Roy, a middle-aged hitman who engages a teenager to help him carry out his final killing.

The Liability is a black comedy, a form which allows appalling violent acts to be committed without either offence or moral consequence, and the convoluted plot turns on a vicious Scots criminal (Peter Mullan) hiring out his girlfriend's delinquent 19-year-old son Adam (Jack O'Connell) to Roy for a hit on the Northumberland coast. Roy is anxious to get the job done so he can attend his daughter's wedding, but things go wrong, partly through Adam's incompetence. An attractive, deceptively innocent witness (Talulah Riley) stumbles across the scene. Blows and bullets are exchanged, severed limbs stolen, ruthless sex-traffickers encountered. A slow start leads to a pleasant trot but never develops into anything that could be called a gallop.