A Gangster’s Life review – funny in parts, but not always deliberately

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Despite some interesting visuals, not even Tony Cook and Jonny Weldon can lift this poorly produced tale of a pair of dodgy lads hiding in Greece from a gangster Here is an odd film about a couple of dodgy lads who get on the wrong side of a bona fide gangster and have to hide out in Greece. It’s not thoughtless per se; rather, it lacks the resources to bring its vision successfully to screen. Its quirks are sometimes appealing and sometimes amateurish and, while a mixture of influences swirl about, from Bond to Kingsman to Guy Ritchie and even Mission: Impossible, the film-makers don’t have the necessary budget, meaning that it feels at times like a TikTok parody of more expensive films. It is a shame, because there are some interesting visual ideas that go beyond route one filming. Example: a goon beating a man tied to a chair on a crispy manicured lawn is filmed in a lovely wide shot, with a guy in the far distance calmly clipping the hedge. But it’s the post-production that is th...
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Black Flies review – Sean Penn paramedic drama tries to grapple the horror

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Fresh-faced rookie Tye Sheridan is led through a world of medical grimness by a grizzled Penn in a tale full of lifeless cliche

There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and adapted from the novel by Shannon Burke. Sirens screaming and faces emoting, they battle through another dark-night-of-the-soul as they deal with gang shootings, domestic assaults, homeless people dying and crack addicts giving birth in hovels. They are often assigned the futile chore of attending to corpses discovered in decaying buildings, surrounded by black flies – but aren’t all the other patients just corpses in waiting? And so the black flies of horror start buzzing into their brains.

Tye Sheridan co-stars as Ollie, the standard-issue Hollywood rookie, a fresh-faced young ambulance guy from Colorado (of all the poignantly innocent places) paired in time-honoured style with a grizzled old-timer. This is the seen-it-all Gene Rutkovsky, appropriately nicknamed “Rut”, a veteran of a million horrors, including 9/11, played by Sean Penn. Fights break out among the guys back at the station house and Mike Tyson has a cameo as the grouchy chief who has to keep everyone in line.

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