The long-awaited first film from the Lottery-funded DNA franchise guys augurs ill for the future. Far be it from me to knock a Brit movie just for the sake of it, but if we can't do better than this then we might as well go back to making pegs and bobbins.
Simon Donald's screenplay is a hotch-potch of ideas and tones lifted, plundered and reworked from just about every bosom-buddy movie from Thelma and Louise to Butterfly Kiss.
Following his overpraised theatrical play, The Life of Stuff, comes this underwhelming screenplay. At least he's consistent.
Susan Lynch and Rachel Weiss play Glaswegian sisters-in-arms who are individually victimised by the violent men in their lives and collectively decide to do something about it. Through a series of accidents that can only happen in a script of unbelievable amateurishness, they knock off one of their vicious boyfriends and then concoct a wholly incredible plan to ransom the corpse to collect £1 million from his older brother (Maurice Roeves).
Their plan is complicated by the intrusion of a corrupt police detective investigating the dead man's disappearance, who seizes the opportunity to acquire some ill-gotten loot for himself. Throw into the mix fashionably violent passages involving a white alsatian (dyed pink) whose ear is shot off, a spurious pro-women-anti-male subtext, a ludicrous quantity of guns, a wholly unconvincing drug scene and a preposterous and quite insulting attitude to logic and likelihood (even in a scabrous "comedy", which this purports to be) and you end up with something like this. Quentin Tarantino would hang his head in shame at the thought he had provided the inspiration behind it.
Rarely has so much talent been so badly wasted to so little purpose. Iain Glen, Lynch, Weiss and Roeves do themselves no favours by appearing in this wretched excuse for a movie. Don't be fooled - it's not funny and not big. It's pathetic.
Beautiful Creatures
Cert: cert18
