An anonymous narcotics dealer plans to leave the business forever but is drawn back into the gangster lifestyle by the sale of ecstasy pills and a missing girl.
Daniel Craig plays a super cautious, drug dealing middleman in this slick British crime drama. He narrates that one should follow some tried and tested rules when choosing to make money in this nefarious profession. Keep a low profile, don't attract the wrong kind of attention by hanging around with loud mouthed and/or overconfident criminals, and always pay your supplier on time.
Craig's character, which is simply known as Mr. XXXX because his name is never revealed in the movie, does exactly that. After keeping his head down for many years he plans to retire quickly and quietly after having one last lunch with his boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) and two other associates, Gene (Colm Meaney) and Morty (George Harris).
One More Favour
Just when the unknown protagonist thinks he is in the clear, Price drops a bombshell and hands down a tough assignment. The job is to find the missing daughter of a close friend named Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon). Also, there is a large shipment of high grade ecstasy pills which have just arrived in London and the man who has the pills in his possession is an inept gangster called the Duke (Jamie Foreman). There are other problems, and they are big. Not only must Mr. XXXX negotiate the sale of the pills, they have been stolen from a group of Serbian war criminals, who have a habit of cutting the heads off of anyone foolish enough to steal from them.
The chance of Mr. XXXX retiring then become smaller by the minute, because he is drawn back into the cake mix, which are layers of criminal society which one must navigate successfully in order to get out alive.
The film has no resemblance to what you would expect to see in American gangster movies. There are no organized mafia families as such, and codes of honor are definitely not part of the criminal agenda. With lots of twists and turns it's hard to know what's in store for Mr. XXXX, who is in a bit of a tight spot when he finds out that his boss, Price, is a police informer and wants to put him in jail.
Now the heat is really on. Caught between a very angry Serb named Dragan and Temple, who are both threatening to erase Mr. XXXX off the face of the planet unless they get those ecstasy pills, he tries desperately to shake both of them off while staying in one piece. Don't expect any humor, because there isn't much of it. Drug dealers never wear smiles anyway.
His eventual fate is ambiguous and open to speculation. The ending shows us that there is no easy way out of a life of crime.
What about his name? His last words are "If you knew that, you'd be as clever as me."
