Get Carter is a nasty British gangster film. For some reason, all British movie gangsters are extremely nasty - from Richard Attenborough’s Pinky Doyle in Brighton Rock in 1947 through Richard Burton’s and Bob Hoskins’ anti-heroes in, respectively, Villain (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980), up to and including The Krays (1990). All our gangster heroes (unlike Edward G. Robinson or Jean Paul Belmondo) are schizoid, sadistic arseholes who shoot people in the kneecaps and sentimentalise about their mums. Rather like the real thing, in fact.