Pixie: Movie Review

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ben Hardy, Colm Meaney, Alec Baldwin, Daryl McCormack

Director: Barnaby Thompson

If your idea of perfect denouement for a film is a slow mo shot out between gun wielding priests and shotgun carrying nuns versus mobsters in a church, then Pixie is your dream in cinematic form.

This mash up of Father Ted, road trip and wannabe Tarantino really offers little else apart from an extremely charismatic lead in Olivia Cooke and a couple of cameos from the likes of Dylan Moran to make it memorable.

When a drug deal goes awry and dead bodies mount up, the local mob - headed up by Colm Meaney’s Nigella-watching bossman Dermot O'Brien - launch a search for the stolen MDMA and money. Unbeknownst to the family central to the crime is Cooke’s Pixie who’s managed to get two innocents Frank and Harland (Hardy and McCormack) caught in the web as well. All three end up on the run looking for a way to offload the drugs and start a new life.

Pixie is a fairly solid but relatively unmemorable slice of 90s Guy Ritchie styled gangster action.

With puerile edges and some questionable humour, the film feels dated at times, but offers enough of an escape from proceedings to pass its 90 minutes.

It helps that a wide-eyed Cooke delivers a standout performance to keep you engaged. Self-assured from the start, Cooke’s Pixie is the jolt the film needs to get it out of the mire it occasionally lands in.

Things are also enlivened by cameos from the likes of Dylan Moran as a fishmonger-based crime boss to Alec Baldwin as a pursed-lipped priest whose desire for vengeance flows as much as his cassock does.

Pixie may be slightly underwritten in parts but it manages a passable slice of film, even if there is a feeling of 90s déjà vu peppered through its DNA.