THE BRITS ARE COMING (2018)

Genre: Comedy
Director: James Haslam
Cast: Alice Eve, Tim Roth, Maggie Q, Uma Thurman, Sofia Vergara, Stephen Fry
RunTime: 1 hr 35 mins
Rating: M18
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 28 June 2018

Synopsis:  THE BRITS ARE COMING follows an eccentric British con-artist couple, Harriet (Uma Thurman) and Peter Fox (Tim Roth), who flee to Los Angeles to escape paying a large debt to a notorious gangster named Irina (Maggie Q) after a failed poker game. In an attempt to raise the money, the couple approach a former associate (Stephen Fry), who secretly sells their whereabouts. With Irina hot on their trail, the pair scheme to win back the money by executing a jewel heist involving Peter’s ex-wife (Alice Eve) and her new husband…

Movie Review:

We love Uma Thurman and Tim Roth, but that’s hardly enough for us to enjoy this terribly scripted and appallingly directed heist comedy. Paired as husband and wife, Roth’s Peter and Thurman’s Harriet are two scam artists who flee to Los Angeles to steal a priceless jewel from Peter’s ex-wife Jackie (Alice Eve), in order to repay their gambling debt to ruthless mobster Irina (Maggie Q). It’s not difficult to see that co-writer and director James Haslam had intended for this to be a Elmore Leonard-styled breezy crime caper, but the result has neither the thrills or the laughs that he intended; instead, what we see are a couple of perfectly respectable actors and actresses forced to make the best of painfully unfunny situations and horribly cliched lines, and we dare say that this will probably go down as one of the worst films we’ve seen this year.

To be fair, it doesn’t start that way – in fact, the opening which sees Harriet doing a drug run for Irina with an elderly woman dressed in a nun’s habit in front of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral promises a sharp, subversive satire. Ditto Stephen Fry’s sadistic cum paedophilic priest Sidney, who is introduced spraying water at two homeless people who had spent the night on the bench in front of his church, and is later seen with his Asian toy boy inside the very place of worship. Alas what spark the first act might have had is surely and definitively doused by the time we are introduced to a whole menagerie of over-the-top folks, including an uptight Jackie, her egotistic self-absorbed actor fiancé Gabriel (Crispin Glover), his rapacious leading lady Vivien (Sofia Vergara) and his long-suffering personal assistant Gina (Parker Posey).

A dinner party at Gabriel’s sprawling mansion in the middle act where these characters are gathered should be the ideal opportunity for all manner of laugh-out-loud shenanigans; unfortunately that potential is not only squandered, but utterly devastated by the sheer absence of any creative display. What is supposed to qualify as humour is a lot of cussing, plenty of inebriated behaviour, unbridled sexual advances and repeated literal pratfalls; worse still, the lines are unfunny, the gags just plain juvenile, and the acting so cringe-worthy you’d feel bad for the talented cast clearly trying to compensate for the quality of the material they have been given to work with. Perhaps the only joke which works is that of Harriet posing as dog whisperer to Jackie’s pet chihuahua, but that alone simply makes how tedious the rest of the movie is so glaringly obvious.

Things do perk up if slightly during the final act, which sees Irina finally catch up to Harriet and Peter as well as blackmail Sidney into locating the couple. But even then, the film struggles to bring itself to a smart yet cheer-worthy finish that any respectable heist movie would, and ultimately fizzles than sizzles with a lame shootout so poorly staged it could very well have ended up on the cutting floor of Maggie Q’s ABC/ Netflix TV series ‘Designated Survivor’. You have to hand it to Thurman and Roth for their commitment, trying to bring as much sass and jazz to a pair of fundamentally unlikeable people despite given so little to work on. It’s been a while since we’ve seen Thurman front and centre in a crowd-pleasing film like this, but the stunningly gorgeous actress chews up every bit of scenery without ever skipping a beat.

We’d had very much liked for this to be Thurman’s comeback vehicle, or that matter Roth’s, both of whom were star indie character actors in the 1990s for good reason. But ‘The Con Is On’ is neither, simply because it is so badly conceived and executed that it deserves to be known only in ignominy. It isn’t smart, it isn’t funny and it isn’t entertaining by any measure, and there’s nothing that any cast could have done to save it. The blame falls squarely on Haslam and his co-writer Alex Michaelides, who seem content for their film to run on the fumes of audience goodwill towards their incredibly and impossibly talented ensemble. The real con here is how they had assembled such a list of celebrities – and unless you want to be scammed of one-and-a-half hours of your life, you’ll do well to avoid this at all costs.

Movie Rating:

(For so valiantly giving their best to a film so dull, dumb and dreary, Uma Thurman and Eric Roth deserve one star each)

Review by Gabriel Chong