Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire review – Brit gangster throwback gets imperial

Michael Head stars in this less than convincing story of a London crime lord and his associates

There was a period in the Cool Britannia days when you couldn’t throw a brick at a cinema in the UK without hitting a British gangster movie with a castful full of dodgy geezers blagging their way around an underground scene full of drugs and farfetched capers. Some were ludicrously entertaining creations of actual working-class talent, such as Nick Love’s The Business, others transcended genre pigeonholing to work their way into various top critics’ lists (such as Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast), and still others were Guy Ritchie movies. There were hundreds of less high-profile efforts too, destined for VHS or DVD, but each having somehow found funding.

These days the British gangster flick is no longer flavour of the week, or month, and there’s something appealingly bullish about attempts to make these films now. Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire is exactly the sort of film that would struggle to find mainstream funding these days, but there’s something worth respecting about the evident hustle involved in making it. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of Henry Roman and his London crime empire, with a patchwork of vignettes showcasing the scrapes, crises and jobs gone wrong that make up the fabric of the lives of Roman and his associates. Enterprising marketing has gone all out to convince the unwary that the film stars John Hannah (Four Weddings and a Funeral), but his role is small; the star of the show is in fact multi-hyphenate Michael Head (as the eponymous Mr Roman), who also writes and directs.

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