© William Ahearn 2006

Long before "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels" and "The Limey," I was a big fan of English crime films. Flicks like "The Long Good Friday" (1980) with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren (and a bit part by Pierce Brosnin) and Neil Jordan's "Mona Lisa" (1986) again with Hoskins and also with Michael Caine and Sammi Davis.

There is another nice Brit crime flick from the '80s titled “Bellman and True." It's about a computer programmer and his son on their own after a bitter domestic split. The programmer is coding the security systems of a bank and sells the code to the Mob even though he knows they can't decipher it.

The floppy disk is now becoming commonplace as well as the Hayes modem. The first Computer Shack store opens in New Jersey. Usenet is being created and MSDOS 1.0 is being developed by Microsoft. Computers are still a mystery to the average moviegoer and for the most part this flick portrays them credibly.

He takes the money and runs but everybody knows you can't outrun the Mob and when he returns they snatch him and the boy and force the programmer to decipher the code.

It has one of those annoying guess-the-password scenes (“Let’s see, he likes cars, so . . . “) but the rest of the movie is so good that it’s forgivable. The Brits have a way with small films and this is one of the better ones.

The programmer is forced to go along on the heist and all hell breaks loose. The ending is worth the whole flick. This is a really good film and one of the best in this series.

 

Many thanks to James Naveira for the loan of the film.