’44 Inch Chest’ has enormously talented cast to puff it up

We have better food and better weather, but for whatever reason, the Brits tend to produce better character actors than we Yanks do. Case in point: the stagy new piece, “44 Inch Chest.” This black comedy-tinged drama, featuring a gang of aging Cockney-accented lowlifes, gets its juice from some decent dialogue and the adorability of its Limey cast. They boost a talky, erratically paced trifle.

Calibrating wit and menace with their customary aplomb, Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, John Hurt and Tom Wilkinson are the great elder statesmen of acting at hand here. Collectively, they bring enormous talent, twinkling macho and decades of good will from delicious past performances in film, TV and theater with them.

The story has nothing to do with a bodacious bosom, as the title might suggest. Though, come to think of it, a fateful decision by a shapely woman — played by yet another fine English veteran, Joanne Whalley — sets this “Chest” in motion.

Often functioning more like a filmed play than a movie, events are confined most of the time to a dingy hideaway. A crew of longtime mates gathers when one of them, Colin Diamond (“Sexy Beast’s” Winstone), becomes the cuckold: His wife, Liz (Whalley), has been cheating and announces she’s leaving him.

Existing in an atmosphere of biting repartee, old school male pride and street justice, the blokes include a gay dandy (McShane), a shriveled curmudgeon (Hurt) and a mother-loving toughie (Wilkinson). They feel they have no choice but to snatch and beat up Liz’s young French stud muffin (Melvil Poupaud).

But will the emotionally devastated Colin kill him? That is the plot’s central conflict as he flashes back on his brutal confrontation with his wife, otherwise hallucinates, and considers the possibilities.

First-time feature director Malcolm Venville and screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto take from the themes of East Ender Guy Ritchie and word gamesman David Mamet. They offer testosterone, nonstop profanity, unrepentant misogyny and chutzpah, but without their predecessors’ humor, acumen or action. For instance when Liz and “Loverboy” are separately roughed up for their transgression, we hear more about it after than we see it happen.

Even with masterful thespians bantering gleefully and alternately stealing scenes from one another, the fundamentals of visual storytelling and dramatic momentum must be served. Not even Britain’s best can puff up a “44 Inch Chest” alone.