Starring Jude Law and Richard E. Grant. Rated 14A.

It takes Jude Law about 30 seconds to bust his pretty-boy image in Dom Hemingway—and man, is he determined to decimate it.

Writer-director Richard Shepard’s crass, outsized Brit gangster flick opens with the title character speechifying on the majesticness of his dick. We see him from the waist up, beefy, sweating, and spitting in a soliloquy that’s equal parts Shakespeare and Frank Booth, against a puke-green jail wall. And it’s clear that some poor bloke is servicing said organ while he’s singing its praises.

Yes, Dom’s a vile creature, a tough safecracker who gets out of the hole after a 12-year sentence for not finking on his boss, the sinister Mr. Fontaine (Demián Bichir). And the film works best as a portrait of this brute, whom Law clearly relishes playing—brazenly baring his widow’s peak, sporting bad bicep tattoos, and spewing crude Cockney with a half-burned cigarette sutured to his lip.

The plot? It aspires to the frenetic heights of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Sexy Beast, but it wanders and suffers from long, talky lulls amid some tension-torqued, Tarantino-esque situations. Dom and his sidekick Dickie (a fey, perma-appalled Richard E. Grant in acid-yellow aviators, foofy ascots, and, oh yes, a prosthetic hand) head to the south of France to collect a reward for Dom’s silence. But when they arrive at Fontaine’s villa, Dom gets just a little too hot for the mob boss’s gorgeous girlfriend, let alone the mountains of available coke, and things go crazily, surreally off the rails.

No doubt, Shepard has style to burn, though he often aims for over-the-top. We’re not just talking set decoration, whether it’s the giant video screen playing a Ping-Pong match between topless twins during a heated backroom standoff, or Fontaine’s dining room, with its giant baboon photos. There’s the way the screen goes solid red (a nod to Hemingway’s fits of anger) and some heady slo-mo, but we could do without all the self-conscious intertitles (“And just like that, opportunity knocks”).

The last act takes a sharp turn into the sentimental, as bad-luck Dom tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Could a lowlife like this really turn around? Likely not, but hey: Law’s on a roll here, and you just might be surprised to find yourself sympathizing with his self-aggrandizing, slick-haired loudmouth.