Vas Blackwood

In Rollin' with the Nines (2006) Blackwood plays Finny, the nervous one in a crew where everybody else is shouting, and he is the only member of it who looks as though he might die. That is why we watched him. Julian Gilbey's film puts a lot of hard men in a room and asks them to be hard; Blackwood is the one who lets the fear show, and in a gangland picture where every scene arrives on schedule, a frightened face is the nearest thing to suspense. We were bored by most of that film, and we noticed that the boredom lifted whenever he came back, because he was the only person whose next move we could not predict.

He did not start in gangland. He began in television in the early 1980s, in series like Crown Court and Angels, turned up in Only Fools and Horses in 1986 as Lennox Gilbey, and was a regular as Winston on The Lenny Henry Show from 1987 to 1988. There was a lead in the children's series Spatz (1990–92), and the usual rounds of Casualty and The Bill. For most of a decade he was a comedy and television actor, and it was the Lenny Henry work that brought him to Guy Ritchie's attention.

Then came Rory Breaker in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), and it is still the part most people mean when they say his name. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but it is the hinge of the career: after it came Mean Machine (2001), 9 Dead Gay Guys (2002), Creep (2004) and Rollin' with the Nines, and a long run of supporting parts in British crime and comedy that continues into the 2020s, with voice work alongside. Blackwood has said of Ritchie that "There was never a rehearsal. This is how sharp he was. He cast who he wanted for each role and you had to turn up and do it." That is a fair description of how Blackwood has been used ever since: cast for a face and a voice the audience already knows, and expected to deliver on arrival.

The voice is the thing directors and interviewers keep mentioning, and it is what lets him play authority in ensembles without raising it. The trouble is that the ensembles are often the problem. He has made three films with Jason Flemyng and four each with Billy Murray, Tony Denham and Simon Phillips, which is to say he belongs to a particular British crime circuit, and that circuit does not often produce films we can recommend.

We would like to see him somewhere with a script that notices what he did as Finny. Until then he is the reason to keep watching a film you have otherwise given up on, which is a real skill and a poor reward for it.