Director – Neil Marshall – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 113m
**1/2
A low life, female criminal falls for a gangster diamond smuggler, then attempts to take back control after a rival gang ousts him – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th and on digital DL from Monday, August 12th
From an opening where a too good to be true sex bomb lures a man into a room then violently assaults his exposed (albeit not to the camera) genitals, revealing herself in a voice-over to be Scarlett (Charlotte Kirk, also a co-screenwriter, who worked in the same capacities on director Marshall’s The Lair, 2022, and The Reckoning, 2020), London-born and bred, and her victim Nacho, who “totally has it coming” from her friend Danny Oswald (Sean Pertwee). After a struggle, we “have to go back a bit” via a series of fast-reverse images.
Thus, this is one of those movies with a framing device which starts in the middle of the film, goes back to the beginning of the story and then at some point arrives at the opening scene before proceeding to tell the rest of the story. Which points out its major flaw: just before that opening frame story scene in the middle of the film comes a scene which completely changes what the film is, from a woman criminal’s romantic involvement with a gangster who gets to know his world to a woman wronged revenge thriller. The first half is, basically, a set-up for the second. Perhaps they should have been conceived as two separate films. Or perhaps the first half should have been dumped and the second expanded.
More positively, one of Marshall’s strengths as both writer and director is that he’s very good at creating characters so instantly identifiable that it’s easy to follow who’s who. This is true of both the group of soldiers in Dog Soldiers (2002) and the group of women cavers in The Descent(2005), arguably still his two best films. (And, for the record, for this writer, The Descent remains the best British movie of the last twenty years, a film about cavers trapped underground which had its UK box office scuppered by opening the week of the London Underground bombings.) It’s true here, too: Duchess has a massive cast of characters, but it’s easy to follow and remember who’s who. It might not sound such an asset, but numerous film are really difficult to follow in this regard. On this occasion, perhaps Marshall tries a little too hard, with titles of their name flashing up onscreen each time the central character’s voice-over introduces another character. If it’s a fault, it’s a fault in the right direction.
It’s probably just as well he does this, because characters come and go pretty fast. The main ones beside Scarlett are gangster and diamond smuggler Rob McNaughton (Philip Winchester), for whom Scarlett falls hard even as he falls similarly for her, and his two back-up men former Angolan mercenary Billy Baraka (Hoji Fortuna) and the aforementioned Danny: as she describes them, the three musketeers, a romantic notion that sits ill with her dialogue in then first half, heavily laced as it is with overuse of the word “fuck”.
A second batch of major characters are introduced some way in when the location switches from London to Teneriffe and Rob’s villa. (The hotel room scene that opens the film, at least at that point in the film, could be anywhere, but, it turns out, is also in Tenerife) Rob’s housemaid Maria (Giada Falzone) will later run a bar that serves as a base when Rob’s gang regroup after a major setback. We also meet associates of Rob who will turn out to be treacherous: Santiago (Iván Hermés), his brother Marco (Jota Ramos), Johannes (David Chevers) and last, but most definitely not least, Rob’s oldest and dearest friend Tom (Colin Egglesfield). According to the latter, one of these is already involved in the “inside job” responsible for Rob, Scarlett and others being attacked in an underground car park in London. Oh, and Rob also has a pet tiger he keeps in a pit.
Much of the casting is efficient rather than memorable. The few stand out exceptions to the mediocrity include Sean Pertwee as a villain who gets a good deal of screen time. It’s hardly something we’ve not seen him do many times before, yet he does this sort of thing with verve, and it’s always a pleasure to watch him do it again. The other presences to perk up the proceedings whenever they appear are high class diamond fencer and force to be reckoned with Charlie (Stephanie Beacham from Dallas, TV series, 1981), the irascible Aunt Nellie (Judy Donovan) who runs boxing gym Aunt Nellie’s Right Hook, and Scarlett’s imprisoned felon father and all-round, nasty piece of work Frank (Colm Meaney). The latter two only get one scene each, which the first gets two: in all cases, you’re left wanting more. The whole thing has the feel of a franchise, for either the small or big screen, and one can imagine a good deal more mileage being extracted from these three characters.
The whole thing might be a riff on that British political lie of recent years, “Take Back Control”, because after the pivotal incident halfway through, Rob loses control of his lucrative diamond-smuggling pipeline and Scarlett, rebranding herself as Duchess, sets out on an impossible, one-woman mission to take it back under her control. It all feels a bit too familiar, though, piling audience-pleasing, British gangster film cliché upon cliché. Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1948), Hell is a City (Val Guest, 1960), Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971), The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980) or Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) this is not. Rather, it’s a fascinating attempt at myth-making that doesn’t quite work.
Duchess is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 9th and on digital DL from Monday, August 12th.
Trailer: