Dir. Kit Ryan, Germany/Ireland UK/US, 2007, 95 mins
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Jaime Murray, Jamie Foreman
Review by Carol Allen
I'm not sure why the writers chose that title, but it turns out to be a horribly accurate description of a film with a good idea, which starts off very promisingly and is then goes wildly off the rails.
Dorff plays Ritchie Donovan, a thief doing a jewel heist job for gangster Groznyi (Sean Pertwee), which goes badly wrong. To make amends for his failure he's forced by Groznyi to go to Russia and steal an priceless antique cross from the penthouse of a Moscow skyscraper. More bad luck for poor old Ritchie, when his trigger happy Russian accomplices Peter (Murray) and Yuri (Russell Smith) kill someone in the course of the job and the three of them find themselves trapped on the unused 13th Floor with a lift full of office workers, whom they take hostage. They think it's the police who've trapped them, but beware of that number 13. As the cast get picked off one by one in bloodier and bloodier ways - one literally loses his head and others get hacked around in various ways - the group discover that they are dealing with a mad and very bad tempered piratical blood stained Tartar (Edward Baker Duly), who turns out to be a descendant of Ivan the Terrible and his equally mad sister (Bronagh Gallagher), who makes like one of Chekhov's more buttoned up characters crossed with a guard from Auschwitz.
When the mayhem first starts breaking loose, this is a not unentertaining black comedy. The cast do their best - there's also Hugh O'Conor as a wimpy coward who discovers a bit of courage, Foreman going psychotically over the top in a way that satirises the psychos he has played in the past and the lovely Jaime Murray from television's "Hustle", who fortunately loses nothing more than an ear, a loss which is easily hidden by her swinging dark locks. But as the blood bath overflows and the gags deteriorate into the sort that only appeal to young men afloat on lager, who used to pull legs off flies, when they were nippers, the whole joke wears thin and it becomes a bit of a bore. Apart of course for those aforesaid young men, who might well enjoy it as a late night DVD, when they get home thoroughly tanked up from the pub.
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