"Pierrepoint," a prison official murmurs approvingly, "I do believe you're the best man we have." Considering that Albert Pierrepoint's job is hanging condemned people by the neck until dead, this is something of a dubious compliment. But the executioner accepts it in the right spirit: "I take pride in me work, sir."

Pride, of course, goes before a fall. For the objects of British justice, the fall is about six feet through a trapdoor; for Pierrepoint, it's a whole lot further. Director Adrian Shergold's Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman is a combination of two English genres: the Social Injustice Movie and the Movie Where Timothy Spall Breaks Down and Cries. Both are beginning to seem like national institutions. The format is so familiar that five minutes of gray skies and teatime is enough to assure the audience that eventually the stoic façade will crack, and Spall's hangman will have a horrifying moment of self-awareness. But first, there's going to be a lot of repression. Albert Pierrepoint is repressed. His wife (Juliet Stevenson) is repressed. His pals at the pub are repressed. The people he works with are repressed. Except for the ones who are no longer repressed, because they are dead.

Shergold has set out to critique capital punishment from the inside, and even though his film is mostly predictable, it's still fairly devastating. That's thanks to Spall, who has created a character who is neither monstrous nor deluded. Instead, his Albert Pierrepoint has the precision of a watchmaker and the tenderness of a nurse; he's dedicated to making the killing process as swift and painless as possible. Which doesn't make him a humanist, exactly, so much as it makes him eerily detached. He's an efficiency expert in the field of death. Spall uses his considerable bulk to undergird these traits—he marches into execution chambers with a crisp, inescapable power, and when he yanks the fatal lever, he thrusts his body forward with the determination of a linebacker pushing into a scrimmage.

The real Albert Pierrepoint pulled that handle 608 times, and concluded (perhaps a touch belatedly) that "executions solve nothing." Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman is too peremptory with that deduction—like most movies of its stripe, it makes little chiding noises at the past—but Spall's performance carries none of that arrogance. Even when the script grows cloying and preachy, the actor remains wholly compelling. He takes pride in his work. .