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There are a million stories in the city of Hollywood Crime Drama. The one on offer in John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 is simple enough. A group of ex-cops and small time criminals are trying to pull off a sting on the Department of Homeland Security. Their best bet for making sure that few police will intercept them, is to have a policeman killed on the other side of the city, causing most on-duty vehicles to swarm to that area. In terms of story arc, this is about it. The rest of the film combines a tense frenzy of highway violence with moody, dimly lit shots of housing projects.

The first good thing about Triple 9 is that the cinematography is captivating and beautifully done. The silhouette of Woody Harrelson, slumped against the wall of a living room filled with empty cans and ashtrays, is as iconic an image as any frame from a golden-age detective comic. What this film has to say could be said in a series of images of haunted, hunted men in a gritty world. This turns out to be a good thing, because most of the things that come out of the characters’ mouths are hackneyed to the point of absurdity. The cops are tough, Christian men who do what they have to do to get by. Their black or Latino co-workers enjoy the freedom to be scheming, to be pig-ignorant, or to be the stand-in desk clerks who get shouted at when a detective needs to launch into a rage against the fact that “nothing ever gets done in this goddamned precinct!”

The performances themselves are generally good. Woody Harrelson assumes the same tough and spiky face of authority he has played many times; Aaron Paul’s tormented weakness is made up of many of the tics he used to form his well-known role in Breaking Bad; and Michael K. Williams, in an interesting cameo, reminds us that he is there when edgy and insightful characters are sorely needed. But it all falls apart once Kate Winslet attempts a Russian accent. The spectacle of Winslet trying to roll her r’s for all their worth while playing the cold-blooded ringleader of the “Russian-Jewish Mafia”, flanked either side by henchmen bearing submachine guns and yarmulkes, is so surreal and unintentionally funny that the gritty pessimism the film works so hard to maintain becomes impossible to take seriously.

Good films can get away with bad accents. They can get away with loosely drawn characters and plot holes, and many police dramas have (regrettably) gotten away with using caricatured ethnic roles to make law enforcement seem like the white man’s burden. Being a boring film, Triple 9 gets away with none of it. You could go for the soundtrack, the lighting, and the stylised grimness of the rolling cities of the American Southwest. But that might not be enough reason.