On a rainy night in December 1995, three youngish gangsters called Tony Tucker, Patrick Tate and Craig Rolfe and plying their trade largely in Southend, were murdered in a Range Rover on a remote country lane near Rettendon in Essex. This drug-related gangland slaying has now become as staple a subject for the British cinema as Chicago's 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre has been for Hollywood. Just as you've forgotten the explanation for the Rettendon killings, another one turns up with a slightly different plot and some new suspects. In 2000 we had Terry Winsor's Essex Boys where Sean Bean gets out of jail and pursues the grasses who put him away. Julian Gilbey's 2007 Rise of the Footsoldier traces the career of one Carlton Leach, a teenage West Ham football hooligan who becomes a major protection racketeer and ends up implicated in the Rettendon affair. Made in 2010, Sacha Bennett's Bonded by Blood reached a level of uninventive obscenity that even David Mamet might have flinched from, but added little to our understanding of the Rettendon incident.

Now with The Fall of the Essex Boys the case is reopened once more and uses as its catalyst the death of a teenage Londoner (her father a former officer in the Old Bill) from a bad ecstasy pill imported by a gang of dim-witted Essex Boys. The cops, several of them bent, become involved in playing off rival gangs against each other, a process that leads to the triple killing. It's very difficult to work up interest once again in such a collection of thick psychopathic mobsters, their molls and their brutish, cliché-ridden lives. The film is further marred by a peculiarly inept commentary by a witness to the events it traces.