On the debit side, and it's a doozy, the picture's narrative trajectory fails to deliver a third act that takes the story anywhere of note except into a silly realm of cut-rate surrealism. Final reel ends not with the expected bang but with an almost inaudible whimper.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.
Mostly, though, 44 Inch Chest is complacently in love with the rhythmically profane talk that came so easily to writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto in "Sexy Beast."
The cast to die for is almost entirely wasted in this machismo-marinated slab of Brit-crime nastiness.
44 Inch Chest gets by on the quality of its performances.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.
The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett
The film's action takes place mainly in one room, with the five characters posturing like angry macho men but slowly revealing their arrested development and juvenile ignorance of life in general and women in particular.