Circus film review

certificate_18

CIRCUS

Memo to all British film producers: please curtail this fixation with making "the next Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels". Guy Ritchie's East End bruiser happened to be the right film in the right place at the right time.

However, if you do insist on replicating that potent blend of gangsters, guns, dodgy geezers and gallows humour, try to keep it simple. Don't burden your film with more plot than absolutely necessary and please cast actors who the audience can take seriously.

For example, who in their right mind would envisage Brian Conley as a sadistic crimelord, Eddie Izzard as a psychopathic bookie, or Christopher Biggins as a oily accountant? Step forward Rob Walker, director of the lamentable Circus.

Set in sunny Brighton, Circus is a modern crime thriller about a con man, Leo Garfield (John Hannah), whose life hits the skidpan when he is hired to kill a businessman's wife (Amanda Donohoe) and learns, after the fact, that his client Julius Harvey (Peter Stormare) was and never has been married.

So who is the woman Leo has just killed? Could it be the missing girlfriend of American heavy Moose (Tony Lister), now in the employ of double-crossing gang boss Bruno Maitland (Brian Conley). And why is Leo's apparently loving wife Lily (Famke Janssen) suddenly so chummy with Julius?

Scriptwriter David Logan overloads his blackly humorous jaunt into the south coast's criminal underworld with more twists than I thought possible in one 90-something minute feature. Double-cross becomes triple-cross becomes complete confusion and rapidly rising frustration. Asking an audience to use its head is one thing, giving everyone a blinding headache is beyond the pale.

Consequently, you distrust everything that you see. You suspect that characters who shift their cinematic mortal coils early on might magically re-appear later on (they do); that sworn enemies will, in fact, be in cahoots (they are); and that seemingly hopeless situations are actually carefully engineered bluffs (strike three).

Needless to say, the film's surprises are anything but, and almost everyone in the cinema will foresee the final revelation long before the serpentine plot deigns to unravel itself in a hail of bullets.