The ending?

It's certainly up to interpretation, but my feeling was that perhaps he has to deal with the man with the gun once he gets back to the house. That outcome is for the viewer to make up. I'm not so sure if him standing at the beach happens after he kills his brother's attacker, or if he's dead, or if, as I suggested, it's a metaphor. Again it's up to us to decide.

All i know about the ending was it ruined the movie. It felt kinda soft ya know?

I believe he fully intended to go get her after scaring the crap out of Boad. If you remember what Helen says in the restaurant it's that Will's problem is that he hates himself so much for the life he has led that he is not capable of being loved. When Will calls Helen and tells her to have her bag ready, he is implying that he really has changed his ways and that he's ready to do as she requested -- just get the heck out of dodge. Helen has a moment of indecision, and then decides that if Will really can just turn his back and leave for good without going to the funeral and without seeking revenge, maybe he is on the road to shedding his former skin and she can be with him. So after a pause and a hesitation, she goes upstairs to pack and wait.

At the time he made the call, Will apparently truly believed that he had really changed and that he would not go back to his old gangster life, and so he finally felt that maybe he could make a go of his life and let go of his guilt and despair about the things he had done. For a moment at least, he imagined that he could shed his old skin and that maybe, just maybe, he was just barely worthy enough to be with Helen. But he couldn't just walk away from Boad. He tried, but he failed. And when that happened, he couldn't get Helen. He was the same dispicable guy he thought he was, and he realized he would never feel worthy enough to lead a normal life or to go back for her.

So Helen and the hit man just sit and wait. What will happen to Helen? Unclear. But it is pretty clear that Will is long gone -- by day break he's made it all the way to the beach so obviously he's not in London any more. The irony is that Will was pretty clearly built to be a gangster. I think the movie is trying to suggest, on some level, that we simply are what we are and you can't really fight it. The simple fact is that by going back and killing Boad even when he didn't want to -- even when the thing he wanted most in life was to be able to walk away and turn his back on who he was -- he couldn't. And in so doing, he saved his own life and possibly Helen's. If he had just walked away from Boad and gone to get Helen, he would have been killed.

That's my thought anyway, and so I think those saying the movie "sucked" are going a bit too far. It's a decent character study that tells its story in a somewhat compelling way. There are a few problems though. For example Boad's motivation for doing what he did seems bizzare. Actually, it's worse than bizzare. It seems mostly like a screenwriting contrivance that allows Will at the end to echo Boad's words -- about the way the Davey walked, or laughed, etc. -- with a very different meaning. You can't make such an important motivation point a screenwriter's trick, and it really kind of ruined the movie for me.

The other problem with the film is Frank. He seems irrelevant almost, other than a vehicle to clue you in to Will's old life. The plot twist with Will's old crew putting one of Frank's men in a body bag, which then leads Frank to try to kill Will, is silly. So is Frank going out of the crew to hire a "discrete" Irish hitman to kill Will, when he had half a dozen opportunities to kill Will as he walks down the street. Finally, the whole thing about Boad being a "gangster" is silly. I'm not even sure that he was, other than from the movie's press. Frank and Will were the gansters. Boad was a nasty car salesman. If he really was a "ganster," one thinks he would have known a bit better who Will was and also would have known that the guy he picked, seemingly at random, to victimize was the brother of the guy who used to be a very serious gangster.

Caught this on tape from Irish telly (RTE 2) march 19th 2008..

This is just my interpretation..........

After will gets a hair cut, he phones helen to say he'll collect her in three hours, presumably after he confronted his brothers rapist (not killed him).

After confronting the rapist, he leaves, changes his mind, rushes back in and kills him. That happens late at night. Because he changed his plan, he decides not to collect Helen, but, to disappear as planned without her. So in the morning, Helen and the Irish hitman are still waiting on the stairs for Will to show up.

In other words, my interpretation is that if he had of stuck to the plan, i.e. confront the rapist, but, not kill him, he would have gone back to get Helen.

i.e. if he had of collected Helen after killing the rapist, she would be implicated in the murder as well and he didn't want to drag her into that.

Not sure if that tallies with other people's interpretations, but, that's how I saw it.

Who cares!?!? All I know is that I got about 45 minutes into it and realized I didn't give a flying leap why the kid died or whether or not he was avenged. The characters were little more than cardboard cut-outs and no reason was ever given why some drug-peddling loser living with his mom should deserve more than a little anal-rape before being found apparently suicided in the tub because he may have enjoyed the rapey bit. To me, it was one more piece of trash off the street, good-riddance. No reason was given to make me want to care.

This movie is a specious pile of mind-numbing drivel.
A forgettable movie by a forgettable director.