JONNY LEE MILLER IN COMPLICITY

IMAGES

COMPLICITY - ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Production notes and synopsis taken from THE CULTURE

While producing Rob Roy in Scotland for Universal in 1993, producer Richard Jackson read Iain Banks' novel Complicity. The book had not yet been published and on behalf of his company Talisman, Jackson immediately optioned the novel for a screen adaptation. Says Jackson, "I was already a fan of Iain Banks' writing and recognised Complicity as a novel which would adapt well for the screen." Banks had written the novel as a "rant against Thatcherism" and in part as a reaction against his own previous novel, The Crow Road, a warm family drama with sinister overtones. On publication one critic described Complicity as "an excellent nervy book, both cool and terrifying at its dark centre....a fast-moving thriller not to be missed"; another praised it as "a stylishly executed study in fear, loathing and victimisation which moves towards doom in measured steps."

With the backing of British Screen, Richard Jackson approached writer Brian Elsley to adapt the novel for the big screen and at the same time he gave a copy of the novel to director Gavin Millar, convinced that he would enjoy the story - he did, and some years later he was able to invite Millar to board the project as director. Jackson explains "In the interim Union Films had bought and developed Iain's earlier novel, The Crow Road, as a TV series for the BBC. Coincidentally they approached Brian Elsley to write and Gavin to direct. Although The Crow Road hit the screens much sooner than we did, the original teaming was ours."

When the script was ready The Arts Council came on board with a loan from the National Lottery, and J&M Entertainment joined the project as Executive Producers, financiers and international distributors. J&M's Julia Palau says, "The script had immediate obvious international appeal. On one level it's a very tight thriller, but asks deeper questions of the audience too. Jonny Lee Miller has consolidated his international recognition since Trainspotting, and Keeley Hawes is one of Britian's most talented up and coming young actresses."

Complicity the novel is written in the first person and is narrated by maverick journalist Cameron Colley. Cameron, fuelled by his intake of drugs and cigarettes, questions the society in which he lives. He rages against the multinational corporations built up by workers who are ultimately thrown on the scrap-heap in favour of bigger profits, and rants about the arms dealers who are tolerated and allowed to launder their shady profits, because today's enemies may be tomorrow's allies.

Written by Banks in 1993 in part, says the author, "as a rant against Thatcherism", Richard Jackson points out that Cameron's concerns are equally relevant today. "It's easy to get worked up about something as the force of opposition to the status quo. The danger is that once the former Opposition gains power, lethargy seeps in and passivity stops things from being improved."

Banks visited the Complicity set during filming and admitted that many journalists in Scotland claim to have been the inspiration for Cameron Colley. The author is quick to point out that the character is a total invention. "I've always tried to avoid basing my characters on real people. Besides, Cameron is obviously a caricature; no journalist could afford that many drugs!" The last time Iain Banks was on a film location was 25 years ago when, while still a student at Stirling University, he appeared as an extra in Monty Python's The Holy Grail!

In adapting the novel for cinema, some of the more gory scenes were omitted. Says Gavin Millar, "We cut down on the volume and intensity of some of the more violent moments. There are things you can read that would turn an audience away from the screen." The production team were anxious to retain the underlying subtle flavour of the novel and throughout the adaptation Iain Banks provided his support, generously offering comments and ideas.

Millar explains that Complicity, although adapted by the same team, is a totally different genre from The Crow Road. " The Crow Road is an up-beat, family centred saga, well suited to television, probably the gentlest of Banks' novels." Millar was attracted to the dark side of Complicity. "It's an opportunity to deal with really hard material. It's violent and upsetting in both its content and its message - a multi-layered exploration of people's ideas about morality."

Born in Scotland, director Gavin Millar continued his education at Oxford University and from there moved into broadcasting in London. Complicity is the first film he has directed in his native land. Shooting television drama The Crow Road in Glasgow and Argyll gave him the impetus to return home to work, and filming a scene from Complicity in Clydebank Town Hall allowed the director to observe the many changes in his home town since he left almost half a century ago. Millar cast actor Jonny Lee Miller in the leading role of Cameron. "He has a great screen presence and an edge of darkness and danger which the role of Cameron demands. Cameron is a bit of a loner, addicted to certain kinds of behaviour which border on the obsessive. You are invited to believe he could be the murderer, and Jonny is able to plant seeds of doubt in the mind of the audience."

Although Jonny Lee Miller is English, he is often presumed to be Scottish following his convincing performance in Trainspotting as Sick Boy, the James Bond/Sean Connery obsessed member of the Edinburgh ensemble. Before accepting the role, Miller had read the novel and was a fan of Banks' work. "I wouldn't want to pigeon-hole the genre of the film. The central theme of complicity, of going along with something even if you know it is wrong, works on a lot of different levels - the personal and the bigger picture." As a veteran of two previous successful adaptations of popular novels, Trainspotting and Regeneration, Miller advises caution when adapting from page to screen. He explains that the beauty of reading is letting the imagination work overtime, while translating a book to screen calls for selective sacrifice while keeping the essence of the book.

Keeley Hawes has been seen most recently in television productions of Our Mutual Friend and The Blonde Bombshell in which she starred as the young Diana Dors. Keeley's character Yvonne is Cameron's university friend, with whom he enjoys an illicit relationship, providing the sexual experimentation that Yvonne declares is the only element missing from her happy marriage to William. Keeley saw the raunchy role of Yvonne as a challenge. "She's a very strong-minded woman, quite outrageous and daring. It's always tough to do sex scenes, but I had worked with Director of Photography David Odd before and knew I could trust him and his team. And Gavin Millar immediately put me at ease." Director Millar and producer Jackson both praise Keeley's talents. "We were lucky to cast her just as she's making that leap to movie stardom," declares Jackson.

Since 1995 Scottish actor Brian Cox has been based in Los Angeles, where he continues to be an ambassador for the Scottish film business. Cox is one of the founders of Screen Scots, a networking organisation based in LA which aims to help Scots gain a foothold in the movie business. Before accepting the role of DCI McDunn, the policeman in charge of solving the spate of murders which have occurred around Cameron, Brian had not read any of Iain Banks novels; he now declares himself a fan. "Playing a policeman is fascinating for an actor. After all, a good policeman is saying one thing but meaning something totally different."

Referring to his happy experience directing The Crow Road, Millar has retained many of the cast members as cameo roles in Complicity. Bill Paterson appears as the newspaper editor always prepared to give Cameron fatherly advice and perhaps one last chance; Paul Young is Frank, the older journalist consigned to the consumer desk, testing products on behalf of his readers; Alex Norton is the cynical photographer from a rival paper; and Valerie Edmonds takes the role of Josephine, the tough sub-editor whose patience is snapped by her dealings with the wayward Cameron. Valerie's role was an addition to the film, not found in the novel. Says Millar, "The novel is very male-heavy; we felt there should be more women on screen. We've added the hint of a failed romance to her relationship with Cameron which creates another layer of strain to their differences of opinion."

Shooting took place all over Scotland, using the bleak beauty of Rannoch Moor and the valley of Glen Coe, where the crew enjoyed the hospitality of an unlikely resident. Inquiring at one of the only cottages on the remote road that passes through Glen Coe on the way to Fort William about the possibility of parking some production vehicles, the location manager was astonished to be invited in by owner Sir Jimmy Savile! Sir Jimmy quickly extended his offer of tea and biscuits to other members of the cast and crew and was pleased to discover a shared interest in marathon-running with star actor Jonny Lee Miller. Sir Jimmy had first seen the cottage on a cycling holiday in 1945 and returned nearly half a century later to buy it.

Shooting on the island of Inchmickery, in the middle of the Firth of Forth underneath the Forth Bridges, caused logistical problems for the production. The island, deserted except for a large population of seagulls who nest in the abandoned fortifications, can only be reached by ferry from South Queensferry. Cast and crew were shipped in daily and warned to avoid the large quantities of seagull guava which coats the island's surface and can cause potentially fatal disease.

Although in the novel Cameron Colley is a resident of Edinburgh, for practical reasons much of the interior shooting was done on location in Glasgow. The offices of Edinburgh broadsheet The Scotsman were used as the Caledonian's offices where Cameron works. When a genuine Scotsman journalist was used as an extra, he was directed on how to look like an actor, while filming with an actor being directed as a journalist!

Producer Richard Jackson is proud to point out that this is his second feature film shot entirely on location in Scotland. While acknowledging his contribution to the ever-growing Scottish film industry, Richard says, "I can't claim it was a conscious decision to shoot only Scottish themes. The coincidence is that I found two good stories to tell which are both set in Scotland. My next project is an adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, set in the South Seas and likely to film in New Zealand."

Gavin Millar and Richard Jackson hope that the audience will enjoy Complicity on many levels. They hope it will be viewed both as a taught thriller with a twist in the tail, and as an exploration of the complicity that exists on personal and political levels today, where a price is paid for the cracks that have appeared in the moral fibre of society.

COMPLICITY SYNOPSIS

(WILL spoil the movie if you haven't seen it!!!)

The house is in darkness. A young, black maid is in the kitchen tied to a chair. Her mouth is taped. A puddle of urine is collecting on the floor below her. The assailant is dressed in black and waits silently on the stairs. The door opens and two people enter: a middle aged man and a young woman. The assailant strikes the man swiftly on the back of the head, knocking him unconscious; he tapes the woman to a chair alongside the maid. The assailant drags the man upstairs and out onto the balcony. The man gains consciousness briefly before he is pushed over the balcony edge.

Newspaper proprietor Toby McCormack is horribly impaled on the railings outside his house; a spike protrudes from his head.

Caledonian journalist Cameron Colley is on another crusade: positioned in the waste grounds at the shores of Gare Loch, with plenty of cocaine to sharpen the mind, he watches as Greenpeace protesters clash with police over the arrival of a nuclear waste container. To Cameron, this is yet more fodder with which to convince his readers of the dangers of government, multi-national corporations and the police. To his Deputy Editor, Josephine, this will result in another of Cameron's biased, anti-establishment ramblings which will need heavy editing before publication.

But today, unusually, Cameron does not have time to see the protest to its bitter end; he heads back to the office to await further instructions from 'Mr Archer', the mysterious mole with the distorted voice, who calls sporadically with titbits of information which Cameron hopes will lead to the biggest exposé since the Watergate enquiry. This time Cameron, to the absolute horror of Josephine, is dispatched to a phone box in the small, deserted village of Dunning, where Archer calls in to add 'Aramphal' to Cameron's cryptic list of as yet unconnected names. Now Cameron is late for a dinner appointment he has been looking forward to with some relish.

Cameron is meeting long-time friend Yvonne who met and married unscrupulous Conservative entrepeneur William whilst at University. Cameron fills the only gap in Yvonne's otherwise happy marriage: sexual experimentation. Although Cameron is a very willing participant, he is constantly frustrated by the reality that their liaison will never feature emotional commitment. Unfortunately on this occasion, William has returned early from his business trip and so Cameron's 'assistance' is not needed. However, Cameron and Yvonne do manage to discreetly entertain each other under the dinner table.

Frustrated Cameron arrives home to Grudge Warriors, a complicated computer game, and one of his favourite passtimes alongside coke, cigarettes and Yvonne, which takes him through to dawn.

Predictably the next morning's paper features a heavily edited version of Cameron's coverage of the Greenpeace demonstration. This time Josephine has decided not to take any more chances on Cameron's political rantings and so assigns him, along with aged hack Frank, to a bland, local interest feature on the whiskey distillery. Cameron is disgusted and barely hides his feelings as he trails round the warehouse behind distillery foreman Donaldson, inspecting barrells and the like. That is until Donaldson lets slip that the owner, Baine, has sold up to a Japanese firm and the long-serving employees are now redundant. Cameron has found his angle.

Cameron has not forgotten about Mr Archer. Today, bizarrely, Cameron is instructed to go to a telephone box in Strathspeld, the small village where he grew up. As he waits for the call, Cameron thinks of his childhood friends: he sees Andy, dressed in army fatigues, shooting clay pigeons, gazing lovingly at Yvonne who was beautiful even then, and Andy's sister Claire, always prepared to go one step closer to the edge. The phone rings, breaking Cameron's thoughts, but Archer hangs up immediately. This time the information Cameron needs is taped to the phone box. It reads: Ares Project.

It is night and the kennels are filled with bright fluorescent light. The fox hounds are unsettled, baying in their cages. A man in his fifties is tied to a cage. His mouth is taped. The assailant is fixing a small black box to each of the man's legs. He has filled the room with newspaper captions and pictures: 'Ares Enquiry Stonewalled', 'Did Persimmon Release Hussein's Dogs of War?'. As the assailant opens the door, the excited dogs surge towards the man. The assailant leaves, detonating the black boxes from a safe distance.

Government Minister Randolf Persimmon bleeds to death in his kennels with his dogs.

The assailant and Cameron's paths seem to be crossing. When Baine, the distillery owner, is found to have suffocated in his warehouse on his own whiskey, Josephine calls the police. DC McDunn is shown an earlier piece penned by Cameron in which he calls for revenge against the fat cats, gun runners, and dictatorial newspaper proprietors, and the need for a Radical Equaliser to exact the retribution the authorities seem unable or unwilling to enforce. Cameron's work is starting to read like a hit list and he is taken in for questioning. He is unable to provide concrete alibis for any of the given times as he has spent them in assorted telephone boxes, alone, in the remote Scottish countryside waiting for calls from Mr Archer. William's hot-shot lawyer secures Cameron's release, but Cameron is instructed to inform the police of his further movements. He has become their number one suspect.

Cameron decides he needs a break and heads north to stay with his best friend, Andy. Andy served as a soldier in the Gulf War before going into business with William. He sold up after his sister, Claire, suffered a heart attack and died as a result of the doctor's negligence. Andy now lives as a virtual recluse in a tumbling down hotel in the Highlands which he bought several years ago as a retreat.

Mr Archer contacts Cameron again and reveals two more names - Jemmel and Azul. Cameron knows he is being framed; he is almost certain Mr Archer is behind it, but he is determined to understand Archer's motives. Cameron takes the bait and heads for Mr Azul's house in Jersey.

The door opens and the assailant shoots the bodyguard silently in the head. He goes to the bathroom and where the fat middle aged Arab is and the assailant whips him viciously round the head with his gun. The man lies half in, half out of the jacuzzi. The water is blood red. The man is dead. His arms have been crudely hacked off.

Cameron arrives to find the arms dealer, Mr Azul, has been literally disarmed.

McDunn brings Cameron in. He is held in a building connected to the Lothian Police Headquarters and reserved for international terrorists, traitors and large-scale criminals. There Cameron learns that Andy has died in a fire and that his charred remains were identified only by his dental records. The police are treating his death as a murder and Cameron is the primary suspect. Cameron is interrogated day in and out by McDunn and Flavell and even begins to doubt his own innocence and sanity. Finally they concede that Cameron could not be the murderer, but that it must be someone very close to him who can predict and control his movements. Cameron is left to think…

He goes back over his life, over his friends, Claire, Yvonne, William and above all Andy; he tries to think of some possible reason or connection. A constantly recurring dream surfaces and Cameron leads the police to a place in the woods where Cameron and Andy used to play as boys. The boys were attacked by a stranger and while the man raped Andy, Cameron ran away. But Cameron returned and they beat the man over the head with a stick, killing him. Cameron and Andy hid the body and never spoke of the incident again. Everything fits into place and it is clear in Cameron's mind that Andy is the assailant and the mysterious Mr Archer.

Andy instructs Cameron and the police to a telephone box outside the Worlds End Pub, Edinburgh, 3am. While they wait for his call a car passes and its headlights illuminate a butcher's shop. Inside, layed out on the counter, are the dissected remains of the negligent doctor who Andy held responsible for the death of his sister.

Meanwhile Andy has called the police station with an address - it belongs to Yvonne and William. Overcome by grief Cameron is escorted to the house where he finds William's body curled up on a mountain of heroin, his mouth filled with money. Andy discovered that William was laundering his dirty money through their company and has sought revenge.

Cameron is freed from suspicion but Andy has still not been caught. On the way back from William's funeral Cameron's car breaks down and a passing driver stops to help. It is Andy. He drugs Cameron and takes him to the island of Inchmikery, a disused fort now populated by seagulls. Andy talks of his bloody campaign, the logic behind his murders and admits he used Cameron as a decoy. Andy's mission is to destroy people in positions of power who have been allowed to abuse their moral responsibility. He spares Cameron's life but urges him to use the newspaper to publicise the message behind Andy's actions and hints that there may be more to come.

Andy leaves Cameron a mobile phone and a choice: he can call the police now or in an hour when Andy has made his escape...

COMPLICITY INTERVIEWS

Millar's crossing

Gavin Millar, the director of Complicity, opens his heart to GAVIN DOCHERTY

A blast of Mozart from the hi-fi filters in through the open door of Gavin Millar's Islington home. The music appears to have a calming influence on him, like therapy. Which he needs by the couch-load right now. The Clydebank-born film-maker's feelings leave little room for ambiguity.

Only 48 hours ago, he had received word that his latest movie - the thriller Complicity starring Jonny Lee Miller - was being rush-released in Scotland tomorrow, leaving little opportunity for a strategic marketing campaign. Adding to his woes, his next project, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play, Quadrille, is in limbo owing to pull-outs by successive female leads Madonna and Julianne Moore. The film business? Gavin Millar enjoys film - but the business is crap.

The pain of having to stand back powerlessly and watch Complicity battle unaided for its cinema audience against the latest much-hyped Hollywood releases drags across his face like a cat's tongue. "It's completely out of our hands," he says. "I wouldn't say this is normal. On the other hand, it is not the production company's responsibility any longer once it is delivered to the backers. Their arrangement with the distributors is entirely their own and they can do what they like, really. At this point, obviously, I don't want to give the film adverse publicity. We would have liked a bit more of a run-up. But they have brought the release forward swiftly for reasons to which we were not party."

The film, shot in Glasgow and Edinburgh, reunites veteran director Millar, 62, with scriptwriter Brian Elsley, the duo who made the award- winning Crow Road for BBC television from the Iain Banks novel. They are back in Banks-inspired territory once more with Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller cast in the role of cynical, left-wing journalist Cameron Colley, who is fed information that suggests a link between the grisly murders of a large number of establishment figures. He is subsequently led into an investigation which makes him question his morality.

Obviously a Banks fan (he thinks Complicity is one of his finer books), Millar liked the moral rage which is at the heart of the action. He was attracted by that.

"What do you do when you see something so offensive to your sense of propriety, your sense of justice, your sense of humanity being ignored by the forces of law and order? How can you cope with this rage without taking the law into your own hands and becoming the person you are objecting to in the first place - sharing the guilt of the villain? That's at the heart of the movie. You can't make a movie of a moral question, so obviously it has to have excitement and mystery, passion, and action."

The film's biggest coup was to have landed Jonny Lee Miller, who will undoubtedly prove to be a draw. He is one of three or four really bankable international young talents - people such as Jonny, Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, and Bobby Carlyle are very much sought after. To have them clear two and a half months of their time is really hard for a director to ask and, fortunately, Miller was intrigued and excited by the Complicity project.

"We were very lucky to get him," says Millar. "I couldn't imagine a better man for the role. I like the dark edge to Jonny. He is not sentimentally charming as a character on the screen. That was important. Cameron is not an easy going, gum-chewing, charming hero. There is something ambivalent about him as well. He captures that wonderfully well for me."

Nutshelling the plot, it revolves around journalism, murder, S&M, sex - now there's a heady cocktail. Post-Diana, though, journalism has become something of a low trade. We're pretty far down the totem pole, and therefore we tend to be a bit leery of film-makers coming along and dropping mushroom clouds all over our already-tarnished reputations.

Yet Millar received the generous co-operation of newspaper editors into whose offices he wanted to cart his film crew for some authentic shots of a buzzing newsroom. "We had wonderful co-operation from everybody. But there was never any time when newsrooms would be free enough for us. So we mocked it up in an old Co-op building."

It helps, of course, when the director knows the terrain. Millar was from Clydebank originally. The archetypal working-class boy made good. His family moved to England with their only son when he was about nine. "It was the old Scottish immigration thing," says Millar.

After school and national service in the RAF, he went to Oxford to read English at Christ Church, then drifted into radio and telly.

"I was lucky to get into the BBC at the time BBC2 was opening up. The atmosphere was much freer. You could do daft things without being hauled in front of three acountants. It was a much more experimental time."

One of these "experiments" resulted in his impressive directorial debut for LWT in 1980 - Cream in My Coffee, a play by Dennis Potter which reputedly spent a large amount of the company's money. Lionel Jeffries and Peggy Ashcroft lavished their combined talents on the portrayal of the couple going back to the seaside hotel in which they had long ago spent their prenuptial honeymoon.

Millar wound his way up through the Play for Today strands and then got a shot at directing for film with Dreamchild in 1985, a Potter-scripted adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic Alice in Wonderland, starring Coral Browne and Jane Asher. This paved the way for Millar's direction of the hit family film Danny, the Chamption of the World, starring Jeremy Irons and Robbie Coltrane. He has even appeared as an actor in writer-director pal Peter Chelsom's comedy Funny Bones.

But it's as a director he'd like to be remembered. "I am making a decent living out of this. I have been very lucky. I get lots of television work and get very good television drama offers and I am grateful for that.

"It's just that sometimes you spend so long trying to set up a feature film. You work on it for three or four years and then you go to the States and you pitch it for two or three months. You think you have got a cast together, you think you have got the locations, and then the money disappears at the last minute. That is depressing and demoralising. It happens to everybody. I have had my bellyful of it, to be honest."

Well, maybe not quite yet. Victoria Wood and Millar are talking about doing a movie together. He is hoping to do an adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, The Beach of Falesa, which he has been working on for five years. Greenock-born Alan Sharp has done the script and they are hoping to shoot that in the South Pacific islands.

Meanwhile, there's a bit more of that sitting around to be done, waiting for things to happen - and listening to classical music for therapy. - Jan 27

REVIEWS

THERE is a formula to serial killer movies. Complicity discards it and gets lost. By concentrating on the dysfunctional lifestyle of newspaper reporter, Cameron Colley (Jonny Lee Miller), tension is dissipated.  

A first-person narrative is used to keep the audience on board. Because of the plot's diversity - going back to childhood, involving youthful activists in their protest years, etc - this tends to confuse, rather than elucidate.

Too much is being stuffed into too small an envelope. There is Cameron, the radical investigative journalist, having his stories slashed by sub-editors. There is Cameron, the addictions collector, hooked on cigarettes, cocaine and computer games, whose sex life with a married friend (Keeley Hawes) appears surprisingly unconventional.

There are the killings themselves that have some kind of connection to... what? Arms sales? Capitalism? Fat cats? There are Cameron's mates from way back, who had a great time, taking drugs, shooting clay pigeons, battling with the cops at political rallies, falling in love - two become millionaires and one dies of bad habits.  

Gavin Millar is not David (Se7en) Fincher. He directs in the style of a TV journeyman. The deaths are grotesque and yet he makes them laughable. By the end, with credibility gone, you neither care, nor understand, except, at the back of your mind is a nagging question: how can Cameron skive off work?

It is not Jonny Lee Miller's fault that Cameron is less interesting than he imagines. As an antihero, he plays it bland, flaffing about like a stoned parrot, waiting for the next atrocity and having flashbacks to more innocent times.  

Seriously good actors, such as Brian Cox (Detective Chief Inspector) and Bill Paterson (newspaper editor), walk on, look concerned, walk off. Edinburgh is the location, although you would be forgiven for not noticing. The Highlands get a better showing. It rains up there.  

The Wolf

See this review in its original format HERE

The Herald review...

Complicity is at least heading in the right direction as a mainstream, Scottish, multiplex movie, says WILLIAM RUSSELL

Let us start with the million dollar question. Is Complicity, whose arrival on our screens has been much anticipated in that very Scottish way - which consists of talking things up before any proof of the pudding has been provided - really the next great Scottish movie, the Trainspotting of the year 2000? Frankly, the answer is no.

But, having regularly wondered in print why we can make decent television thrillers, yet somehow not manage it in the cinema, Gavin Millar's slick account of a distinctly daft Iain Banks thriller is very welcome. Admittedly, Banks's plot makes no sense, the gaping hole in his logic being disguised by much trendy drug-taking, some dated anti-Thatcher ranting - whereas ethical foreign policies would have been a far more up-to-date target - and several sexual practices unknown to missionaries. But, that said, the film is a step in the right direction. It has been made to entertain. If the result adds up to no more than the creators of Taggart churn out with such efficiency year in and out, it is certainly better than Rancid Aluminium, the load of old rubbish posing as a contemporary thriller into which the Welsh Arts Council put their lottery cash.

Complicity holds the interest. The locations are well chosen, assorted Scottish thespians fill in the minor roles effectively, and Croydon's Jonny Lee Miller essays a more or less convincing and consistent Scots accent as coke-sniffing, sexually-deviant journalist Cameron Colley (he is a masochist; it helps in this profession if you are) while Brian Cox lends some necessary weight as DCI McDunn.

 The plot consists of a series of murders - all linked, it turns out, to Cameron's past as a left-wing crusading journalist, although such evidence as there is of what he actually writes is less than convincing. Cameron is getting anonymous phone calls, which he thinks come from his man in MI6, directing him to the scene of the crimes. It turns out the killer is deleting from society persons he considers unworthy, such as arms dealers, bent Government ministers, and money launderers, in ways the Mikado would approve - which is to say the punishment fits the crime.

 Lots of moody flashbacks to Cameron's youth point to the fact that his friends must include the killer, which is giving nothing away because subtle plotting is not a Banks speciality, or at least not judging by Brian Elsley's script. I refuse to believe there is a Scotsman alive, apart from those in a Dudley D Watkins' comic strip in The Sunday Post, who ever said: "Help ma Boab."

 Nor is plausibility a Banks attribute.The logistics of the killings are highly suspect. If it takes Cameron all his time to get from A to B, how does the killer - just as remote from B if not more so - get there before him with enough time to do some complicated scene-setting on top of the killing? And why did the pair not meet, given that they must have used the same airport on the way there or back?

 As for the climax, set on an abandoned island in the Firth of Forth, where the killer leaves Cameron with a mobile phone and a dilemma - call the cops now, and get him caught, or wait a while and let him go free - why go there in the first place, except that it is a photogenic location?

 The sex scenes, which involve pretty Keely Hawes, are a big mistake, even if they are only there to sell the video. Not only is the lady not raunchy enough, her heart does not appear to be in it. Lee Miller is actually too lightweight to carry a film on his own, albeit pretty in a Kenneth Williams sort of way - all flaring nostrils and facial twitches - but he makes a harmless passive lead. The face that shines out of the murk belongs to Rachel Sterling, far and away the best looking of the various girls, as a junkie who comes to a bad end. David Odd's photography, given that Complicity was patently shot in absolutely rotten weather in midwinter, is extremely handsome, and Gavin Millar's direction does at least keep things on the boil throughout, which is not easy.

 The problem with the film is, since Taggart and its ilk can be seen on the telly for free, why bother to pay to see a celluloid Dolly?

But that ignores the fact that Complicity, like The Debt Collector, is at least an attempt to come up with a mainstream, multiplex movie - something few recent British films even aspired to, let alone managed to be - and it deserves an audience of more than just Taggart fans.  

BUY