THE GLORY BOYS

A hot-and-heavy reworking of an honorable formula: find the needles (a novice Palestinian assassin and his IRA confederate) in the haystack (London) before a visiting Israeli nuclear physicist becomes the next front-page terrorist fatality. A job for British Security, and bodyguard duty for Jimmy, a whisky-dependent, cold-blooded veteran gun. If there's a hero on the premises, it's not Jimmy but hitman Abdel-El-Famy, whose pathetic stream-of-consciousness will draw grudging sympathy even as he abets the strangulation of a policewoman, tosses bullets and grenades into a scholarly assembly, and drifts inexorably into a Kamikaze frame of mind. Seymour puts a touch too much trust in the admittedly foolproof suspense device of cinematic quick-cuts--lurking killers to trembling victim to stolid Security and back again--and the thinness of the invention shows. Minor tedium may set in before the final body count. However: if you expect no more than two dimensions (if a woman isn't a ""silly bitch,"" she's a ""stupid whore"") and place faith in machine-gunned pace and tight-lipped dialogue you may be mildly pleased that Seymour (Harry's Game) has again cribbed a novel from the headlines.