Critic Reviews

This movie is one amazing piece of work, not only for the Hoskins performance but also for the energy of the filmmaking, the power of the music, and, oddly enough, for the engaging quality of its sometimes very violent sense of humor.

Brutal and brilliant.

The Long Good Friday is arguably the best British gangster film ever made due to its politically-charged story and the performances of Bob Hoskins and Hellen Mirren.

As a collage of glossy gangster conventions and one-liners, The Long Good Friday explodes with energy, but it’s the political and social tensions that make Mackenzie’s film a lasting vision of British tragedy.

A touchstone for many of the sub-standard gangster films Britain mercilessly churns out today, The Long Good Friday is classy fare and superior viewing to its modern counterparts in every way.

Hoskins’ bullish, black-comic Napoleonism makes this movie: pugnacious, sentimental, a cockney Cagney.

In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting

In many respects a conventional thriller set in London's underworld, The Long Good Friday is much more densely plotted and intelligently scripted than most such yarns.

Hoskins performance shows a man who clearly believes that he’s on the right side of history, and once this big, good deal is done, he will have atoned for past sins. The film is brutal in the way it conclusively proves him wrong, right down to its iconic final shot in which Shand sits in the back of a car struggling to settle on the emotion that would amply capture his frazzled state.

The Long Good Friday charts a perilous course through a world of powerful people, ghastly acts of vengeance and ominously shifting fortunes.