The Business (2005)

"My old man wrote me a letter from prison once. It said if you don't want to end up in here, stay away from crime, women and drugs. Trouble is, that don't leave you much else to do, does it?"

That quote starts The Business, and it's not a bad start. In fact, the first act of The Business is quite a pleasant surprise. And then it starts to go downhill, leading to a third act that has lines of dialogue like the following: "The good thing about losing everything is there was nothing else to lose."

Danny Dyer plays Frankie, a young lad who ends up heading from London to Spain when he needs to lay low for some time. He delivers a bag to the charismatic Charlie (Tamer Hassan), a club owner and big cheese in town. Charlie works with his hot-headed partner, Sammy (Geoff Bell). And what follows is the rise and fall of some typical British gangster types.

Written and directed by Nick Love (who apparently didn't meet a FILA-wearing thug he didn't like), The Business is a mass of things you've seen done before, and done better. It glamorises the lifestyle shown onscreen, despite the section showing the downfall of certain characters, and it accompanies many scenes with a lively '80s soundtrack.

Which isn't to say that this isn't a fun watch when it is getting some things right. It's hard to not enjoy watching people swan about in sunny Spain while some great tunes are playing, but the fun factor starts to disappear as soon as, well, the fun disappears. 

Dyer does a good job in the main role. It’s well within his wheelhouse, of course, but he does everything well, particularly in the early scenes that have him trying to do well while being a lot less cocky than he becomes later. Hassan is the big-hearted, “good”, criminal boss, for the most part, and it’s one of his better roles. And Bell gets to be the typical psycho who causes things to spiral. Not forgetting Georgina Chapman, the woman who turns heads, and knows it. Chapman does fine in a role that is typical of how women are viewed by these kinds of characters. Other familiar faces appear in small roles, but the focus remains on Dyer, Hassan, Bell, and Chapman. 

Although not for everyone, and there are probably a number of people who will enjoy it for all the wrong reasons, this is quite an easy film to enjoy if you are in the mood for what it is aiming to provide. It’s one of the better movies that Dyer has done. Although that isn’t saying much, considering he is an actor with Run For Your Wife in his filmography. 

4/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Beyond The Rave (2008)

Remember when Hammer tried to take Dracula and place him into modern times? They tried their best, bless them, but the end results were poor, and seem much more dated today than any of their movies set in a yesteryear full of quaint villages, bustling taverns and aristocrats lording over local commoners. I mention those movies because this movie, from the reborn Hammer, suffers from, essentially, the same fate.

It's a vampire film, with the vampires all setting up a big rave to catch all of their victims. Among the potential victims are Ed (Jamie Dornan), a young man about to head off for active service in Iraq the next day, and his girlfriend, Jen (Nora-Jane Noone). There are also some hard gangster types (led by movie bruiser Tamer Hassan) about to get way out of their depth.

Originally released as a series of webisodes, Beyond The Rave never shakes off the feeling that it's a number of scenes stitched together with very little thought given to the overall storyline. The fact that the movie still contains the episode numbering, appearing every few minutes, doesn't help, but there's also a real lack of logic throughout, a few characters who appear and disappear at random, and a third act that's very hard to care about, thanks to the mix of derivative moments and sheer stupidity.

The acting isn't that great, although anyone expecting Tamer Hassan to do anything other than act tough and spit out expletives really shouldn't be looking in this direction anyway, but it's far from the worst aspect. Dornan and Noone make for decent leads, Matthew Forrest is likable enough as Necro, their friend, and Sebastian Knapp is stuck portraying his vampire character in the bored, moping style. Sadie Frost has a cameo, but makes a great impression with her memorable scene, Steve Sweeney is okay as one of the other hard men tagging along with Hassan, and the rest of the cast simply pop in and out of the screen without making much of an impression.

Viewers will be unsurprised to find out that director Matthias Hoene followed this up with (the much more enjoyable) Cockneys Vs. Zombies. Thankfully, with that movie he had a much better script. Writers Jon Wright and Tom Grass really drop the ball here, apparently just content to rip off the opening sequence of Blade and fill out the rest of the movie with random moments that obviously seemed a good idea while they were struggling to stretch their weak material to feature length. Prime example, an old vampire who spends his time getting stoned and talking to ravers who bump into him in the woods could end up interesting or laughable, but instead just ends up being another diversion. If his character had a decent resolution then I must have blinked and missed it. As far as I'm aware, he just disappeared after his two main scenes.

There are some decent tunes in the soundtrack, some sexy female vamps, a few decent bits of gore, and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . well, actually, that's about it. It's not quite among the very worst vampire movies out there, because there are a lot of cheap vampire movies that are SO bad, but it's not really worth your time either.

4/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Rave-DVD-Jamie-Dornan/dp/B003OUV1K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1393891671&sr=1-1&keywords=beyond+the+rave

Layer Cake (2004)

Layer Cake is an important movie for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's the film that saw the hugely talented Matthew Vaughn step out from the shadow of Guy Ritchie (he'd previously been producer on Ritchie's movies). Secondly, it showed Daniel Craig's leading man potential and even, yes, gives him a Bond moment. Third, it showed that British crime movies could still be fresh and entertaining without coming across as some pale Lock, Stock-wannabe. Fourth . . . . okay, I'm not sure if there are any more reasons so I'll stop there. But Layer Cake is certainly more, thanks to what it achieved, than just another UK gangster movie.

The story revolves all around Daniel Craig's smart drug dealer, a man who wants to make his million and get out of the business. Of course, anyone who makes the big shots a lot of money will always struggle to extricate themselves from the criminal lifestyle and that's exactly the case here. Avoiding the police, trying to stay alive and setting up a deal involving a million stolen pills, Craig really has his work cut out for him.

Mixing a smart script with great performances (Craig is superb but he's more than capably supported by the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon and everyone else who appears alongside him), cool visuals and an ideal soundtrack this film may not cover any new ground but it gives everything a fresh coat of paint with it's easygoing, effortless air of . . . . cool. This film has style in abundance. That's not to say that it glorifies the lifestyles shown or any of the violence we see, hell no. There are people here we'd never want to meet in real life and when things erupt into violence they do so with absolute brutality, impacting on the lives of those involved. There are no consequence-free, thoughtless actions here. Everything is weighed up and accounted for, even if it's after the fact.

It's an absolute corker of a film that has grown on me with each subsequent viewing. I'm sure that many others will still simply cast it aside as "yet another British gangster flick" but that's not the case and I hope that others give it a chance and end up enjoying it as much as I do.

9/10

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Layer-Cake-DVD-Daniel-Craig/dp/B0006HIPOK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1371682047&sr=8-5&keywords=layer+cake

Eastern Promises (2007)

David Cronenberg followed up the magnificent A History Of Violence by reteaming with leading man Viggo Mortensen and creating something that works as both a companion piece and also a flipside to their preceding movie. A here and now of violence, if you will.

Events are set in motion by a young girl who gives birth to a child, but dies in the process. Naomi Watts plays a nurse named Anna, present at the birth and worried about the future of the newborn child. She takes a diary that belonged to the deceased girl, finds out that it's in Russian and sets out to get it translated, in an effort to find a family for the baby. Unfortunately, in her attempt to do a good deed she finds herself mixing with some bad people. Bad Russian gangster types. The big boss is Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), messy situations are created by his son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and everything gets cleaned up by Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who constantly refers to him as just a driver. As Anna gets more involved with these people she puts herself, and others, in a very dangerous situation.

Unhurried, unfussy and completely unglamorous, Eastern Promises is a typically cool look at some unpleasantness by Cronenberg, working from a fantastic script by Steven Knight. Set in London, he matches his usual style with the great cinematography by Peter Suschitzky with outstanding results. London isn't the collection of buildings scattered around Big Ben and Notting Hill that it so often is in other movies. It's simply a big city, a place full of areas and buildings that you could pass by every day without a suspicion of what has gone on there.

But it's the acting that really lifts this up to a fantastic viewing experience. Naomi Watts is very good in her role, believably strong in her eagerness to do the right thing while also visibly unnerved. Armin Mueller-Stahl is great as the typical, cold gangster boss and Vincent Cassel is always entertaining as Kirill, the son who can never seem to do any right for doing wrong. The film belongs to Viggo Mortensen, however, and his performance is almost perfect. Okay, there may be problems with the accent to those who have a better ear than I do, but it's not too bad. Not too bad at all. His dialogue is also backed up by a physical performance arguably better than the one he delivered in A History Of Violence. Able support also comes from Sinead Cusack, Jerzy Skolimowski and even Tamer Hassan, in a small role that still allows him to feature in the most memorable sequence in the entire film.

Although the movie has quite a few moments of violence in it, none of them are flippant, "easy" movie deaths. This is a film about every bloodletting sending a message, about every body telling a story (be it through tattoos or fatal wounds) and about how much some people will risk in order to make a difference for the better. It's all that, PLUS it's a fantastic gangster movie AND it has one of the best and boldest fight scenes set in a bathhouse since . . . . . . . . . . . well, since ever.

9/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Promises-Blu-ray/dp/B0010VXMQW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370799643&sr=8-2&keywords=eastern+promises

Freerunner (2011)

Horrible, just horrible. Freerunner is, annoyingly, a half-decent premise surrounded by a complete turd of a movie. One or two decent stunts save it from being the worst of the worst but it's such a lazy, poorly executed film that I actually felt angry while watching it.

I don't know what's more unbelievable. The fact that I have continued to try to convince myself that one day the likes of Danny Dyer and Tamer Hassan will one day appear in another decent film or the fact that it took THREE writers to cobble together this nonsense.

Mind you, while the writing is bad it's almost par for the course for this kind of film - the emphasis is, at least, on the action. I'm not letting Matthew Chadwick, Jeremy Sklar and Raimond Huber completely off the hook but most of the blame should be passed on to director Lawrence Silverstein, who took a movie all about freerunning (a smooth and entertaining pursuit) and decided to let all of the action scenes look as if they had been filmed by a pack of dogs who just happened to be in the vicinity.

Tamer Hassan plays yet another onscreen hard man, Danny Dyer is a cocky arsehole and there are a bunch of freerunners who run about the city, snatching flags while people bet on the results. Sean Faris plays Ryan, a freerunner who wants out and decides that he will get someone to bet a LOT of money on his final race, allowing him to retire a rich man. For some reason, he sees happiness in his future with his girlfriend Chelsea (played, HORRIBLY, by Rebecca De Costa - I mean, seriously, I am tempted to start a Kickstarter campaign to just pay her off so that she never acts again). Unfortunately, that all goes to pot when the runners are all gassed and wake up to find that they have exploding necklaces on and must now race for something much more important than money. That's the plot, in a nutshell.

Taking a number of elements from a number of superior movies (off the top of my head I'll namecheck Wedlock, Battle Royale, The Tournament and District 13) and then draining them of all fun before throwing them to the bottom of a barrel that is then filled to the brim with excrement, Freerunner is a waste of time and it's more frustrating because it's not a complete waste of time. The core idea is sound, it's just developed so poorly.

It doesn't help that nobody onscreen appears to have gone to any actual acting classes. Hassan is in the movie for a very short amount of time so almost escapes unscathed . . . . until we get to his awful last scene. Dyer just gets worse and worse in every movie recently and I'm starting to get embarrassed for him. No doubt he would be a geezer about it and tell me not to shed any tears while he was quids in and having a good laugh but I spent more time than most people fighting his corner (based on his fun turns in Severance, Human Traffic, The Football Factory and even Mean Machine) and this is the last straw. I'll still end up watching his movies, to review them, but I'll always brace myself for the worst rather than hope for something better. Sean Faris is pretty bland, I already mentioned that Rebecca De Costa was awful and Casey Durkin is stuck with providing all of the exposition for those who weren't able to keep up with the complex plot. Oh, she also bares her breasts for a second to keep male viewers happy - it feels very much like a halfway "restore point" compared to how tough going the movie is. Ryan Doyle is a tough, win-at-all-costs, freerunner but he's just as bland as Faris. In fact, only Joe Zamora and Tony Vo stand amongst their fellow runners and gamblers while the much older Seymour Cassel shows everyone how acting SHOULD be in his short amount of screentime.

In case I haven't made myself clear enough, Freerunner is an awful film with awful camerawork, an awful script and awful acting. Could I do something better with a group of freerunners and my own camera? Get me the freerunners and the equipment and I'll show you. Hell, if the people involved in this movie can keep getting work then I don't see why I can't break in to the industry and easily make something better than this.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freerunner-Blu-ray-Sean-Faris/dp/B007JI9B74/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1351007627&sr=8-2