Good gravy. Who let such a mangy, ninth-rate Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels-wannabe into multiplexes? This wretched new Brit caper sees a gang of likely lads and credit card fraudsters fall foul of a violent French criminal. Played by a German actor (Thomas Kretschmann). Using a Danish accent.
If the crooked quartet – the chief geezer (Ed Speleers), a kinder sidekick Fordy (Why, Will Poulter?), a gullible one (Sebastian De Souza) and a weaselly one (Alfie Allen) – can’t cough up a cool £2 million, their nationally challenged nemesis will set his proudly cut-price Polish thug on them. For the sake of consistency, the thug is played by a British actor of Turkish-Cypriot descent.
Cue hair-brained scheme involving a trip to Miami, yer wan off Hollyoaks (Emma Rigby), a fake moustache and phoney Arab prince. Feminist viewers need not worry their pretty little heads with the Bechdel Test: this film has both types of women: blondes and brunettes. Tottering on heels. Mostly in bikinis. Or sliding on poles. The kind not played by British actors of Turkish-Cypriot descent.
There’s a clumsy xenophobia about the casting and the characterisation. Americans are dumb. Foreigners – that strange lumpenproletariat who are neither from America nor London – are a fierce dodgy crowd altogether.
To be fair, the English characters are equally, if unintentionally appalling. What can co-writer and director Julian Gilbey (whose last film, A Lonely Place to Die, displayed nothing like this kind of idiocy) have been thinking?
