Welcome to the Punch, review 15 cert, 99 min. Dir Eran Creevy Starring James McAvoy, Mark Strong, Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey Practically every hard-working actor in Britain turns up in Eran Creevy's chest-puffing action thriller Welcome to the Punch, but the true star of the movie is our capital itself. It's rare to see London used this way, as a darkly glittering backdrop like Hong Kong in the Infernal Affairs movies, or Los Angeles in Michael Mann's Heat. Credit to Creevy where it's due: imbuing Canary Wharf with a cool blue genre majesty, he's stepped up the visual ambition no end after his tight little debut, 2008"s drug-crime drama Shifty. It's a pity, though not a calamity, that he didn't come up with the script to match. Like both the aforementioned movies, it's a yin-yang affair between opponents who rarely meet: a criminal mastermind called Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong), and his nemesis, a hot-headed detective called Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy), whose knee is permanently swollen after Sternwood put a bullet in it. The basic trouble is that they feel like characters we've met a thousand times, thin of identity and locked into blueprinted combat. Solid though he is, Strong has played a few too many of these laconic bruisers, and McAvoy, cottoning on to an inevitable wider conspiracy, does an awful lot of seething and grimacing without truly establishing a person we want to care about. The plot certainly has its moments, particularly an encounter between Johnny Harris and Andrea Riseborough in a self-storage container which prickles with a quiet, intimate terror. Creevy's film has a different kind of promise to Shifty, bigger stakes, and larger flaws: next to his sources of inspiration, the exposition is rusty-sounding, and the casting of David Morrissey as a police commissioner gives much of the game away. It deserves respect as a kind of instructive failure - an honest showcase for the various ways Creevy can and should keep getting better.