So what happens when a group of heavyweight Brit actors get together a for big screen bash? The result is an alarmingly lightweight effort, unfortunately. Ray Winstone, Tom Wilkinson Ian McShane, John Hurt and Stephen Dillane star in ad director Malcolm Venville’s directorial debut.

Colin (Winstone) is, putting it mildly, a tad upset when his wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) tells him that she’s leaving him for another man. To try and snap him out of it, a bunch of his mates do what any friends would do – they kidnap the man his wife is seeing.

The group then spend a lot of time contemplating the fate of their kidnapee, who they have placed in a nice-looking wardrobe in the corner. The final say however, rests with Colin and Colin alone. Due to his fragile and highly volatile state of mind, Colin’s final decision isn’t likely to be popular with everyone/anyone.

The writing team of Louis Mellis and David Scinto made quite an impression with their first script Sexy Beast in 2000, but we’ve had to wait some time for this its follow-up. Despite similar dialogue, this is a different beast altogether. What the pair have really written here is a stage play. And newbie director Venville has shot it as such. And although being completely dialogue led would certainly work well in a theatre, the characters they’ve created are nothing more than caricatures.

John Hurt, for example, is a great actor – one of our best, in fact. Here though, his portrayal of Peanut is nothing more than a parody of a Tourette’s suffering Steptoe.

And Ian McShane, who arguably played the most watchable character on television in the last decade ( with his stunning performance as Deadwood’s Al Swearengen), camps it up no end in the curious role of Meredith; but ultimately there’s too much fluff and not enough meat and bones to the part.

Even the weighty of presence of Winstone seems wasted in the lead; there’s a lot of emoting going on there, but very little of anything else.

Considering the main characters are supposed to be a gang of heavy types, there’s nothing remotely menacing about them, being as they are all talk and no trousers. And unfortunately, if you take away the repetitive use of foul language - which after being constantly battered around the ears with it, soon becomes nothing more than words – we’re left with dialogue that simply doesn’t deliver on any front. This is simply unforgiveable when you consider that their last film was ten years ago. It’s difficult to believe that they couldn’t come up with anything better than this in all that time.

44 Inch Chest is not only too staged and stagnant, it also disappoints on far too many levels. It would probably work in a dinky theatre somewhere, but as it stands, nothing about it is big enough to fill a screen for the cinema. And if all that wasn’t enough, it has the kind of ending that can make an entire audience simultaneously think ‘is that it?’. The answer to which is, yes, sadly that’s really it.

What really should have been quite an explosive experience, ends up being rather limp-wristed slap in the face instead.