Christie Malry is twenty-something male who lives in West London with his terminally ill mother and works in an office, a job he finds unfulfilling and so distracts himself from the boredom by having violent fantasies in which he threatens his manager with a shotgun.
In addition, Leonardo da Vinci is employed there, and these scenes also follow his struggles as he challenges what he sees as interference into his artistic vision from the Catholic Church, against a backdrop of an imminent invasion by the French army.
He then starts a job at Tapper's chocolate factory, where he meets Headlam, an eccentric co-worker whom he becomes friends with, and shortly afterwards hits upon the idea of using double-entry bookkeeping as a method of recording perceived wrongs made against him by society then cancelling them out by committing what he deems to be equivalent acts of revenge.
Christie's initial attempts at balancing out the supposed injustices against him start with him committing petty acts of vandalism, such as running a key along the paintwork of a car whose owner had sounded its horn at him or throwing a brick through the window of an off licence he believed had sold his mother bootleg alcohol, along with causing trouble for his employer by discarding letters of complaint sent to the company and, in addition to starting a new job, he enters into a relationship with Carol, a girl he meets at his local butcher's shop.
Christie now gravitates to actual violence, taking advice from sources such as The Anarchist Cookbook and blowing up a local tax office by placing a home-made bomb in a toy train and sending it through a tunnel adjacent to the building.
In the DVD commentary, Tickell and Moran discuss how Billie Piper was considered to perform the vocal on this song as she wished to work with Luke Haines, though this ultimately did not happen.
However, in the DVD commentary, Tickell and Moran discuss how most of the film was shot in Luxembourg, including the scene at a hydro-electric plant where Christie poisons London's water supply, and how precautions often had to be made to disguise the true locations, such as getting traffic outside a pub to drive on the left side of the road as the characters walked in to make it look like it was in the UK.
[9] William Thomas, writing for Empire, was also positive, awarding the film four stars and praising Tickell's use of "striking visuals" to "illustrate his Kubrickian attack on the injustice of society" and adding that "Moran gives an impressive turn as the titular (anti)hero.
[12] Tom Charity, writing in Time Out made a similar point, saying "your reviewer is bound to confess that algebraic theory might be considered less compelling than the misadventures of our would-be-accountant", but otherwise praised its "low budget ingenuity" and called it a "brave, risky adaptation".
This was noted in a review by Studio International, which praised the film's 'prescience, subject matter and intelligence' for pre-emptively addressing issues such as the attacks on Iraq, domestic terrorism and financial crises.