Son of a Gun

JR (Thwaites) has been given six months in prison for an unspecified crime and inside he falls in with infamous heist man Brendan Lynch (a bearded McGregor). Accepting protection from Lynch's gang, JR has to pay his dues when he gets outside by organising a daring prison escape involving a helicopter. Reunited, JR and the gang are given a job by Russian mob boss Sam (Koman) but JR threatens to derail the enterprise by falling for the sultry Tasha (Vikander), Sam's part-time lover.

Son of a Gun takes its time getting down to the bones of the plot: it's almost forty-five minutes before the heist idea rambles around and sequences involving the happy hardcore-loving gun-runner distracting from the narrative thrust. Once it does, it moves along nicely.

Avery, who also writes the script, is hell-bent on making the audience like the protagonist, which isn't essential really. Without a family, JR carries around with him pictures of happy strangers, which means he's a good kid at heart; he's is sentenced to only six months (so whatever he did can't be that bad) and is prepared to take a beating if it means saving his cellmate from rape. Lynch has his morals too: he beats and cuts loose a long-term partner when it emerges that he was inside for raping a schoolgirl all along. He also insists that no one gets hurt during the heist. Later, a dying perp asks that his cut be given to his little girl.

But despite all this hard work there is still no way into the characters, who seem to be there solely to service the story, and by the close they still remain a mystery: unknown and forgettable. The attempts at character depth feel tacked on; at one point Tasha, on the run and on the receiving end of a beating, stops to smile at kids on a jungle gym. These moments just don't feed into the story.

Sometimes it's prone to cliché - JR falls for Tasha and they embark on a secret affair, the chess-loving boss - this crime thriller just isn't engaging enough and its twists and turns are flat.

But the cast are game and the mini-me Michael Mannisms do throw up the odd exciting sequence: There's a nifty car chase that's all too short and the breakout, however improbable, is exciting stuff.