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In the wake of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the British film industry rapidly became swamped with bad gangster films in the late '90s-early '00s that seem even more desperate today than they did then. In one of the all-time great cases of pearls-from-swine, the producers of Rancid Aluminium brazenly plastered the quote 'The best film of the century' from one review all over the ads while omitting the rest of the sentence pointing out that that was only because, at the time of writing, it was the only film that had been released in 2000. Looking at it today it's hard to imagine how it ever got made, uniting a cast that was briefly considered the cream of Cool Britannia's Lads Mags Brigade Rhys Ifans, Sadie Frost, Nick Moran and Joseph Fiennes but now merely a guarantee of a turkey every time in a confused adaptation of a confused James Hawes novel. That the plot is never explained could be down to the possibility that no-one really knows what it is, or perhaps simply don't think it matters. Something to do with Ifans' businessman being set up with Steven Berkoff's homicidal Russian crime lord in a money-laundering or investment scheme (it's never clear which because no-one ever asks) by Fiennes' crooked Irish accountant, who expects the Russians to kill off Ifans so he can take over his failing company. Things get increasingly confused and underexplained from there on, Ifans alternates between shouting about how terrible his life is while juggling visits to the fertility clinic and sleeping with his secretary and Tara Fitzgerald's ludicrously accented Russian temptress, Berkoff keeps on saying "Bizniss" and "Francis Drake" and Fiennes does a decent Irish accent while proving that just because he played a great writer in Shakespeare in Love doesn't mean he's any judge of good writing when it comes to film scripts.<br /><br />When the most convincing performances come from Keith Allen and Dani Behr, you know a film is in deep trouble. With Poland standing in for a Russia filled with people with Polish accents and a strange score that veers from John Barry pastiche to lounge music to Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western on a stylophone budget, it fails completely in the cool stakes it's aiming for and ends up in a curious overplotted but almost plot less limbo all its own, sitting there like a joke shop dog turd. |