REVIEW - WELCOME TO THE PUNCH

The kind of throwaway thriller that Hollywood churns out for a dime a dozen, only director Eran Creevy seems to have eaten up his big (or bigger) budget opportunity to make a British equivalent a little too hastily. His ambition to emulate sucks all the originality out of this film - what originality such a tired concept ever had - and just as he acquires a Hollywood slickness, he also acquires a pompousness that is surely only half-forgivable when there's an actual reason to be pompous. The cynic in me assures me that Creevy's reach does not merit praise while his grasp lags behind, certainly not when he's reaching for something as shopworn as this. He works from a blueprint, one which was never particularly interesting anyway, and doesn't deviate once. Wouldn't you know that the streets of central London are curiously deserted for the nighttime car chase? That the villain is employed to deliver the inevitable (and rather essential) explanatory monologue at gunpoint? That the police never show up until immediately after the fight has finished? That, in numerous heavy gunfights, only a handful of shots are landed? That not everyone is to be trusted... mais non, Creevy's plot encompasses every single cast member, to the point that you could tick off character after character involved in some form or another until there were none left. And that the only female characters of note are the daft grandmother and the obligatory sole female police officer, who spends her last few moments morphing into a love interest and then a seductress? Of course, isn't that the only means of persuasion she has at her disposal? The blokes have their guns and gurns, all she has is tits and teeth. That it's Andrea Riseborough in the role only made me want to slap Eran Creevy more. After this pretentious smudge on the careers of almost all concerned, he deserves one.