| |
|
New Town Killers (15)
.jpg)
|
|
Dir. Richard Jobson, UK, 2008 97 mins
Cast: James Anthony Pearson, Dougray Scott, Alastair MacKenzie
Review by Carol Allen
After writer/director Jobson's impressive 2003 debut "16 years of Alcohol", this movie is a sad disappointment.
It's a thriller set in Edinburgh. Pearson plays Sean, a hard up teenager, who is so desperate for money to pay his pregnant sister's debts that he agrees to a proposition from two well dressed strangers to take part in a hide and seek game through the night time streets of the city. If he survives until morning, he gets the money. The strangers turn out to be a corporate banker Alistair (Scott), who is putting his rookie companion James (MacKenzie) through a darkly ruthless initiation ritual. There are only two possible outcomes to the plot - either Sean is killed or he survives and gets paid. The challenge is to make the bit in between gripping and interesting.
It's not a bad plot idea for a thriller but one of the problems with the film is Jobson's love of low lighting, so for much of the chase one is peering through the gloom trying to work out what is happening to whom, which mitigates against the tension. Pearson, when we can see him, makes an engaging hero, though for a supposedly poor and uneducated boy, the character displays such impressive computer skills towards the end of the film, that one wonders why Alistair doesn't just offer him a job. Scott, good actor though he is, is lumbered with an unbelievable character of largely unmotivated physical and vocal viciousness. There is a hint of a tragic past in the possibility of a wife and daughter who were raped and murdered and a suggestion that through this character and his contemptuous rants against the total uselessness of members of the lower orders such as Sean and his sister, Jobson is having a vague pop at the corrupting evils of capitalism and class, but it's so unfocused as to be incoherent, as indeed is much of the plotting, while the dénouement makes no sense whatsoever.
On the plus side the way that Alistair's tentacles appear to extend into all areas of Sean's life, even to the extent of manipulating his best friend Sam (Charles Mnene), is effectively disquieting and there's a touching performance from Liz White, best known as the chirpy WPC in "Life on Mars", playing Sean's hapless sister.
The DVD extras feature "Behind the Scenes" footage and an audio commentary by Jobson, which may or may not throw some light on some of the more incomprehensible aspects of the film, particularly the character of Alistair. Unfortunately I can't comment on that, as the extras were not available on the review copy that I viewed.
|
|
|
