Brighton Rock: Film Review

10:17 PM PDT 10/14/2010 by Ray Bennett, AP

Rowan Joffe's film of Graham Greene's 1938 novel "Brighton Rock" takes a gothic approach to the story of a young thug obsessed with hell with little of the writer's subtlety and too much reliance on a loud quasi-religious choral score.

TORONTO -- Rowan Joffe's film of Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock takes a gothic approach to the story of a young thug obsessed with hell with little of the writer's subtlety and too much reliance on a loud quasi-religious choral score.

In his first film as director, screenwriter Joffe (The American, 28 Days Later) sets the drama entirely in Brighton on the U.K.'s Sussex coast but transplants the story from the book's 1930s to 1964 during the Mods vs. Rockers gang wars. That cultural conflict and the burgeoning '60s social revolution, however, have little to do with the central story, which is a typical Greene tale of good versus evil.