The cliffhanger ending of series two – will serial killer Paul Spector survive his gunshot wounds? – has been quietly defused, since Spector (Jamie Dornan) now has series three stretching out ahead of him. What was less expected was that this opener would look like a homage to Sky One's appallingly graphic surgical drama, Critical.

"I can add colours to the chameleon," Richard III remarks of himself early in his anguished, marauding ascent to the throne, and the description could equally apply to the electrifying actor, Ralph Fiennes, who is London's latest hedgehog/dog/toad/bottled spider (pick your animal imagery of choice).

Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.

Any drama in which a crazed crone stares silently at an urn containing the ashes of her murdered husband is not afraid of raising Shakespeare’s ghost. It doesn’t matter that Gunnar was a philanderer who foolishly went sailing with his lover’s husband – his widow still grieves for him even though he died at the end of the last century. Having scattered his ashes in the sea, Mildred the Mad (Johanna Ringbom) immediately ties herself to an anchor and goes overboard. Her companion in the boat, Jonna, who as a child witnessed her father kill Gunnar, once again does nothing.

For anyone living in the UK at the time, the Dunblane massacre on 13 March 1996 was an event so seared into their minds that they can remember exactly where they were when the shocking news came through.

The city of Boston has been creeping up the charts as a hotbed of cinematic criminality in the last decade. First came Martin Scorsese's Oscar-scooping epic The Departed, then Ben Affleck chipped in with The Town, both movies driven by their portrayal of tightly-knit groups of characters immovably rooted in their native Bostonian soil.

A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed.

Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? 

The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.

That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who rescues the omelette from burning, owns quite a nice Subaru and fields his constant apologies. Then one night he gets mugged by two armed thugs. Without an idea how, he dispatches both in a trice and is soon banged up by the sheriff. More killers arrive and this time Mike needs a little longer to do them in.

Meanwhile at CIA headquarters a turf spat has broken out between Mike’s former handler Lasseter (Connie Britton, pictured) and her preppy younger boss Yates (Topher Grace), who has decided to flex his muscles by wiping out her sleeper agent, the only success of a programme to train up mental patients as government assassins.

The script by Max Landis has a twist or two along the way, including a nice reveal about Phoebe that gives Stewart more to do than look on admiringly as Eisenberg lays waste to all-comers. “You’re his girlfriend, his mom, his maid and now you’re his lawyer?” says the cop when she advises him under arrest. Maybe that’s not all she is.

The film crescendos into a festival of splatty, splurgy cartoon violence: director Nima Nourizadeh has been hard at study of action genre tropes. Gore has not been this glorified in a comedy since James Gunn’s Super, in which a loser cast himself as a horribly vengeful superhero.

Are the laughs good enough to keep pace with all the punctured flesh? More or less. The joke of Mike’s incomprehension holds up reasonably well (“Is that a lyric?” he asks when greeted by a bafflingly coded message from Lasseter). Before he has accepted his destiny as a ruthless killer, Mike frets neurotically that he may be a robot. The best laughs are at the expense of the CIA, though there’s nothing to match the sheer bliss of Robert de Niro outwitting the Agency in Midnight Run. Eisenberg and Stewart are likeable, and there are fun cameos for John Leguizamo as a paranoid drug dealer who thinks he’s black and Bill Pullman as a national security capo. The film seems all set to cue up a sequel, but instead compresses it into the closing minutes. By then, the joke has done its job and run its course.

Overleaf: 'Piss My Pants' – watch a clip from American Ultra