This year, Jameson Irish Whiskey presents the Jameson Cult Film Club, a year-long programme of special screenings that take place around the country. The selected Cult Films are presented in key non-cinema locations while also adding some surprises along the way for the invite-only audience.
Of all the attempts to put a Tarantino spin on the British gangster movie, this is the freshest and most successful. Set entirely in a fantasy East End and shot through a drunken haze, it creates a world related to reality and to old crime movies but also self-contained and original. The plot is a complex collision of several sets of crooked characters. Our heroes – Eddy (Nick Moran), Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher) and Bacon (Jason Statham) – are harmless wideboys who find themselves in a pickle when Eddy loses a rigged three-card brag game with local mob boss/porn baron Hatchet Harry (PH Moriarty). The lads are required to hand over half-a-million quid by the end of the week or suffer the attentions of Harry’s debt-collectors, a bald head-dunker called Barry The Baptist (bare knucks champ Lenny McLean) and the fearsome Big Chris (football hard man Vinnie Jones). The quartet overhear their nastier neighbours planning on robbing a group of public school dope cultivators and decide to rip-off the rip-off artists.
Ritchie’s colour-desaturated style, use of unusual background music, scattershot slang and black comedy give the film the feel of an altered state of perception, whether it be Eddy’s shaky devastation at running up the debt or the various spells of drunkenness, dope trancing or adrenalin rush that smite all characters. And it ends with the best bit of dangling since The Italian Job.
Kim Newman
Empire
Please note: this screening is only available to Jameson Cult Film Club members.
For details go to www.jamesoncultfilmclub.ie
