Lowdown Dirty Criminals: Film Review

Cast: James Rolleston, Rebecca Gibney, Robbie Magasiva, Cohen Holloway, Samuel Austin, Scott Wills

Director: Paul Murphy

Wrapping comedy caper with a criminal edge, Lowdown Dirty Criminals is a strong contender for a ramshackle, relatively easy-on-the-eye Kiwi take on a Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels-style story.

Boy's Rolleston is Freddy, a pizza delivery boy who wants more from life, but who in the opening frames, appears to be in a Reservoir Dogs-style standoff with a bunch of low-lives. Using quick cuts and flashy on-screen graphics, Murphy begins to spin his somewhat shallow and scatty but amiable tale.

When Freddy and hapless mate Marvin decide they want to be small time crims, they end up in the thrall of bald-headed baddie and small time mafioso Spiggs, and on his payroll. But after a series of stuff-ups, the duo find themselves with one deadly mission - kill a man or be killed themselves.

Obviously, part of the low-rent charm of Lowdown Dirty Criminals is that this duo is beyond inept, and unable to do what's needed, so the film becomes about how they deal with the confluence of bad luck which surrounds and swirls around them as the deadline approaches.

And while occasionally the film goes for the gross out slapstick and oddly underwritten characters (with one of those bordering dangerously close to racial stereotyping), its short run time, and endless energy and penchant for the puerile, coupled with a very likeable Rolleston rediscovering the form he lost in Pork Pie, make it a sordidly scrappy, yet undeniably entertaining watch.

Coupled with some laugh-out-loud one liners and a playing-against-type Gibney clearly having a ball as kingpin the Upholsterer, the film's vicarious pleasures and goofy charm keep it going into the final strait.

There may be elements of a NZ version of Pineapple Express and every other inept criminal story you've ever seen, but thanks to the use of small locations, a tight script, and injection of energy and charm, this gun-toting screwball caper is a relative cinematic local diamond in among a recent collection of celluloid rough.