Not even the reassuring presence of Riz Ahmed can prevent this London-set thriller from becoming another addition to that burgeoning sub-genre: the underwhelming gritty British crime drama. Ahmed plays whisky-supping, nocturnally inclined private dick Tommy, a Marylebone Philip Marlowe tasked with hunting down a missing person after a prostitute comes knocking at his door. Cue a sprawling investigation that takes Tommy to the darkest corners of the capital, where he finds an old schoolfriend turned business mogul, and a fundamentalist imam. All the while, Tommy is haunted by a harrowing incident from his teenage years, thanks to the reappearance of femme fatale-y old flame Shelley (an underused Billie Piper).

Transposing hardboiled trappings on to modern multicultural London is a promising idea on paper, but too often City of Tiny Lights is let down by an overeagerness to play up its source material, and hampered by unnecessarily showy direction and inadvisable attempts at gumshoe dialogue (“You don’t strike me as the sensitive type.” “Only when I shave”).