Gruff American ex-pat gambler and career criminal Bob Montagnet (Nolte) looks good for his age - the Stone Age.

Lumbering round the seedy clubs and gambling joints of the Riviera, Bob resembles no-one so much as a kleptomaniac Grizzly Adams with a heroin habit.

However, when he bumps into imported Russian bar girl Anne (Kukhianidze) while shooting up in a damp cellar he has some sort of epiphany.

With the added lure of an ambitious one-off heist to retire on, he decides to kick the scag and clean up his act for one last job.

However, he doesn't check into the Priory... he handcuffs himself to the bed and sweats out the cold turkey until he's cleansed. Job done.

Although highly watchable, Jordan's take on the caper movie suffers from the old malady of casting an international troupe of players.

On paper, a mix of American, British, French, Georgian and Algerian actors should bring a rich dynamic to the proceedings.

However, it all ends up a bit like a cinematic It's A Knockout, with the central plot submerged under too many strands and everyone playing the joker.

Nolte's dialogue appears to have mainlined on Elmore Leonard while Kukhianidze's love interest is of limited interest to anybody, such is her irritancy reading.

There's some good lines - Fiennes' vengeful double-crossed art dealer threatens to cut Anne's face up in the Cubist style - "a new aesthetic without anaesthetic".

And a sex change gang member isn't to be trusted any more, because of fears he may now "talk like a woman".

However, the impact of the setpiece heist is completely blown away by a denouement that shatters the first rule of the caper movie - keep it real.

Tim Evans