Even though the setting is the rancid underbelly of London, the cast eclectic and international, the subject matter sordid with frequent touches of nasty sick-joke humor, and the underlying theme a cry of outrage at the socioeconomic exploitation of immigrants who come to England from third-world countries, Stephen Frears' latest offering is not a serious drama done in a contemporary style but instead an expert emulation of a certain type of vintage mid-twentieth-century Hollywood filmmaking (the 1963 Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn entertainment CHARADE comes to mind), a slickly performed and briskly paced thriller with a handsome Nigerian cab-driver hero (Okwe, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) whose moral courage leads him, after much agonized soul-searching, always to do what's ethically right even when it means resisting tantalizing temptations, confronting deadly dangers, and, worst of all, maybe having to reveal the big secret in his past, and a charmingly innocent, desperately imperiled Muslim waif of a heroine (Senay, played by Audrey Tautou) much in need of being saved by our gallant hero, and best of all, a villain (Sneaky, played with evil panache by Sergi Lopez) who's so oily and despicable, so loathsome and creepy, that by comparison he makes a puddle of syphilitic slime look like the tears of Mother Theresa, not to mention a cartoon menagerie of colorful and eccentric secondary characters (you'll groove on Benedict Wong as a supercynical morgue attendant with a dry, morbid wit), plus oodles of Hollywood sentiment and Hollywood suspense, a highly contrived Hollywood plot with a typically implausible Hollywood surprise ending that I enjoyed even though I could smell it coming long before it arrived, and of course, a classic cornball Hollywood romance that seems doomed to end in a heartrendingly sweet but tragic parting of the lovers - in short, DIRTY PRETTY THINGS is completely silly but also loads of fun.