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I had high hopes for Outlaw. Its premise � victims of crime who feel the justice system is no longer working form a vigilante posse and clean up the streets � while hardly original, offered the opportunity to look at what ordinary people might be driven to in the face of the perceived breakdown in law and order in contemporary Britain, but I was worried that writer�director Nick Love might not the best man for the job. Sadly, Outlaw turns out to be exactly the kind of film you'd expect from the man whose previously offerings condoning, if not outright glorifying, football hooliganism (The Football Factory) and ex-pat gangsters (The Business), respectively, have apparently built him an enthusiastic fan-base among what might be politely termed the more thuggishly-inclined sections of society.

Arriving home from Iraq to find his wife shacked up with another man, stern-faced paratrooper Bryant (Bean) checks into a seedy hotel, where his collection of automatic firearms gains him the admiration of oddball hotel security guard Hillier (Norris). Hillier proudly shows off his wall of TV monitors displaying feeds from the cameras he's hidden in the hotel rooms so he can watch their various occupants shagging, shooting up, or both. Bemoaning the state of the British justice system, Hillier and Bryant assemble a group of disparate characters who've all suffered acts of violence and feel let down by the law: Gene (Dyer), a City boy bullied at work, whose recurring nightmare of a violent beating turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy; Sandy (Friend), an Oxbridge student scarred for life after an unprovoked attack; and Cedric (James), a barrister whose wife viciously attacked by a local gangster he is prosecuting. Armed with Bryant's firepower and intelligence dossiers provided by Cedric's driver, Walter (Hoskins), a policeman with a tabloid newspaper's obsession with paedophiles, the group hits the streets to deliver their own brand of frontier-style justice.

Despite the director's obvious talent for visual flair and a couple of excellent set-pieces � including a brilliant baptism of fire scene in which Bryant arranges a fight with a bunch of lager louts after they racially abuse Cedric in a bar � the film's major problem is that its ambition to tackle the important issues are hamstrung by the script's lack of intelligence. The movie also fails to live up to the trailer hype; by focusing the group's actions purely at the gangster's drug business (hijacking his takings and assaulting a couple of low-level dealers), the film seems oddly small in scale. Love tries to liven things up near the end with a gun battle against armed police but the scene just doesn't fit right, and you get the impression it was added just so the makers could stick an AK-47 on the poster and bulk out the trailer with a cool-looking action scene.

The end result is muddled and unpleasant, a violent morality tale with no apparent morality that plays like a movie adaptation of a Daily Mail editorial. If it's true about Love's fan-base, with Outlaw he doesn't seem to be looking for a new audience. Which is odd considering the sort of people who would get a buzz from the film are the very people targeted by Bryant and his vigilante posse.

The film's poster features a quote from Nuts magazine which proudly states: "The Football Factory with guns!" Which says it all really.