The budget for this geezery Brit crime thriller was raised through crowdfunding. You have to applaud the chutzpah and can-do entrepreneurialism that lay behind that … but the dialogue, the story, the acting and the directing are all just leaden.
The movie is composed of a handful of different stories – all equally implausible and silly – united by the fact that a serial killer has escaped from a psychiatric facility in Cornwall, the “St Andrews Mental Institute”, and this notorious homicidal maniac is to encroach on these different lives in different ways. They include a criminal gang intent on pulling off an improbable “heist” in that part of the world, a put-upon salesman in revolt against his horrible boss and – weirdly – what appears to be a second mass killer. There’s a police officer with a bizarre, non-regional American accent who says things like, “Stop cocking around and let me do my fucking job!” and “I know you’re tired but caffeine up! No one is going home until we find the trail of breadcrumbs!”
There’s also the depressingly predictable lad-mag lap-dance club with lad-mag babes – one of whom is prevailed on to do some lad-mag sex in a Travel Tavern-type hotel room (presumably with payment, although this is coyly left unspecified), and we also get some sub-Fight Club shenanigans.
It would be great to see a British indie genre movie break out, but there’s not an ounce of genuine originality or style in this whole thing.
