THE CORRUPTED (18)
★★★ ★★
CRIME and punishment walk hand in hand in director Ron Scalpello’s gritty crime thriller based on true events.
In 2002, crime syndicate boss Clifford Cullen (Timothy Spall) gets a tip off from his well-placed contact Hammond (Hugh Bonneville) that London will be bidding for the Olympic Games in 2012.
Cullen forcibly purchases land in East London including
a plot belonging to father-oftwo Eamonn McDonagh (Sean Dooley).
As soon as Eamonn puts pen to paper in exchange for a duffel bag of cash, his death is staged as a suicide.
Seventeen years later, Eamonn’s wayward son Liam (Sam Claflin) emerges from prison after serving nine years for armed robbery.
He returns to Stratford with brother Sean (Joe Claflin), determined to rebuild bridges with old flame Grace and their young son Archie.
Unfortunately, Liam is drawn into the tangled web spun by Cullen, who is now CEO of a housing consortium with politicians and police officers on its payroll.
Liam’s fate also becomes entwined with idealistic police detective Neil Beckett (Noel Clarke) and his partner Grace Connelly (Charlie Murphy), who intend to eradicate corruption from the force.
The Corrupted is slickly engineered with familiar tropes recalling The Long Good Friday, not to mention BBC’s Line Of Duty. It doesn’t scale those heights of narrative sophistication and tension but is a satisfyingly tangled conspiracy.