There’s a lot of promise to the premise of City Of Tiny Lights — a contemporary noir set in London, starring man-of-the-moment Riz Ahmed as a PI who seemingly subsists on nothing but whisky and fags. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, quite a bit. That promise is squandered, and the results are ordinary in the extreme.
Sadly, this noir leaves its best elements in the shadows.
The set-up ticks so many noir boxes, you can imagine the ghost of Raymond Chandler standing in the shadows, nodding approvingly. We have the dingy office, the missing working girl, the world-weary hero, the dodgy feds and, of course, shady business deals — it’s just a pity that all this juicy stuff takes up only half the film, with a huge amount of screen time given to a narrative told in lengthy flashbacks that Philip Marlowe would convey in a line, a shrug and a slug of bourbon.
And what flashbacks these are — a sorry tale of teenage infidelity and betrayal in a cheaply realised 1997, it plays increasingly ludicrously, even if the young actors struggle gamely with weak material. The soapy tragedy builds to a conclusion so melodramatic, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. There’s also a severe case of flashback syndrome — every character knows what happened, but we’re drip-fed information in a way that frustrates rather than tantalises.
Anyway, this nightmarish event goes some way to explain why Ahmed’s Tommy is such a dour sort, even if he can occasionally come up with a nice zinger. Lines like, “I’ve got bog roll more abrasive than you,” tease the noir-meets-kitchen sink feel we could have had, which is presumably what attracted a class act like Ahmed, but much of the gumshoe work feels perfunctory. His private detective actually does very little detecting, outsourcing a lot of the actual work to a young hanger-on, and the traditional noir pleasure of the scrappy outsider being the smartest guy in the room is somewhat undermined by the fact that it takes him a full hour longer than the audience to realise there’s something off about his property developer mate. Instead, we get endless brooding and a level of chain-smoking and boozing that sits oddly with Ahmed’s gym-toned bod, as anyone who’s hit the weights after a night on the suds will know.
There are flashes of what could have been: London is shot as if it’s twinned with the city from Seven, and Ahmed finding himself caught between sinister War On Terror types and an Islamist group who might be a little too enthusiastic in their beliefs is potentially fascinating. Billie Piper shines in an under-developed role as the girl who got away, Roshan Seth is great fun as Ahmed’s cricket-loving dad, and Alexander Siddig has a standout cameo as a hardcore mullah. Sadly, though, this noir leaves its best elements in the shadows.