Starring Timothy Spall and Juliet Stevenson. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, June 15, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

The Bible says "Thou shalt not kill", but that's just a book the state sticks in a defendant's hand before it condemns him to death. Such complexities, or ironies, or whatever they are, were never the provenance of Albert Pierrepoint. He was perhaps not the U.K.'s final executioner but certainly its most prolific, having efficiently dispatched more than 600 humans in a career spanning 20 years.

Timothy Spall, the burly character actor who enlivened so many Mike Leigh movies, here grabs a truly opaque character and tries hard;sometimes successfully;to wring some deeper meanings from him. Still, the taciturn hangman is not that much more yielding in cinematic retrospect than he was when alive and killing.

A Lancashire grocery trucker, Pierrepoint for years had a secret side job, one his father and uncle had done before him. Albert's distinction was to become even more crisp and dispassionate in his avocation, viewing himself as a swift purveyor of justice. By day, he delivered tinned goods; on weekends, he brought souls to the Almighty. For a while, he kept the job a secret from his missus, a game shopkeeper played by Juliet Stevenson with more than a hint of icy malice (despite being handed an underwritten part). Even after Pierre ­point opened a pub with his proceeds, he stayed mum about his special skills;that is, until a call from newly victorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery changed all that. A lot of wholesale Nazis to dispose of? Get princely Albert in the can.

As long as the movie, directed by Brit-TV veteran Adrian Shergold from a script by Jeff Pope and Bob Mills, sticks to exploring the compartmentalized morality of its central character, the tale exerts a grim fascination. But after a while, the dialogue becomes more laden with message-making declarations. Spall turns him into a tortured antihero, but there's not that much on paper to make him matter much to us. And some stylized moves;like presenting Ruth Ellis, the last women executed in Britain, as a beatific figure offering Albert some kind of absolution;seem unduly strained. In the end, England (like most civilized countries) simply outgrew capital punishment. But there's little indication that Albert Pierrepoint thought he was anything but a hard-working Christian.