Duchess (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Neil Marshall shouldn't be Guy Ritchie
Charlotte Kirk and Neil Marshall collaborate again, in a crime flick where Neil Marshall tries to channel his inner Guy Ritchie - maybe he should stick to horror if he wants to return to form.
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00:00Don't mess with Charlotte Kirk as Duchess, her latest collaboration with Dog Soldiers director
00:04Neil Marshall. Kirk plays a peck and pickpocket who becomes a gun-toting avenger when her diamond
00:10smuggler boyfriend Philip Winchester is killed. Although Kirk is not as egregiously miscast as
00:15she was in The Reckoning, and this is a better film than that, she still doesn't entirely convince,
00:19especially outside of the action sequences, which at least she gainly throws herself into.
00:24But this is an exploitation actioner by way of a Guy Ritchie movie, which is to say it's
00:28one of those films where literally every character is introduced with a freeze frame,
00:31a voiceover and a title card, and honestly with its Tenerife setting it feels more like
00:35Danny Dyer's The Business. Duchess seems to have forgotten that good revenge flicks don't
00:40take an hour to actually get to the revenge. The entire point of starting in media res
00:45is to skip the boring stuff, not go back and show it all. Frankly I was most alarmed by
00:50Neil Marshall's weak direction, with its flat scene coverage, crap CGI blood, poor pacing and
00:55wasting coal meanie, I'm even wondering where the Marshall that made Doomsday went.