Deviation

Deviation

     

Nurse Amber (Hellboy 2: The Golden Army’s Anna Walton) is heading home to her family for a well-earned rest after finishing her shift when she’s carjacked and taken hostage by dangerous escaped convict Frankie (National Treasure Danny Dyer).  On the run after staging a bloody prison break, Frankie’s planning to leave the country and just need’s Amber’s help until morning when he plans to get on a plane and fly to Europe.  All Amber has to do is behave and he’ll release her unharmed.  So he says.  But Frankie’s a violent psychopath with a hair-trigger temper and he’s not in the mood to be messed about.  Amber’s in for the longest night of her life…

Just imagine if they tried to remake The Hitcher.  Tough, isn’t it?  It’s such a good film, one of the best horror/thrillers of the ‘80s; a dark, disturbing thrill-ride, precision-tooled to scare the bejesus out of you. You’d need to be crazy to try and remake it.  Then imagine they went and replaced creepy Dutch nutbag Rutger Hauer with some English actor, somebody like Sean Bean.  Wait a second…What?  What do you mean they did that?  They remade The Hitcher with Sean Bean?  Were they out of their tiny minds?  The answer is yes, they probably were.  But at least they didn’t decide to set it in London.  Which is what JK Amalou has essentially done with Deviation, casting Danny Dyer in the creepy nutbag role and Anna Walton as his hostage, the poshest nurse in the world.

15 years ago Amalou wrote and directed the risible Mockney gangster movie Hard Men in which half the cast of London’s Burning and Dodger from Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest swear uncreatively at each other while gangland tour guide ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser looks confused, like an elderly man trying to remember if he’s soiled himself that day.  I don’t know what Amalou’s been doing since but it certainly hasn’t involved honing his craft. 

Deviation is bad.  It’s not Sex And The City 2 bad.  It’s not so bad it will offend the very core of your being.  It’s just…bad.  A mediocre piece of bland filmmaking.  The action is repetitive.  Frankie threatens Amber, Amber tries to escape, Frankie catches Amber and kills whichever random passerby is attempting to aid her.  Gargle, rinse, repeat.  The film is visually boring, opening with an incredibly long scene where the camera floats along behind Amber as she has two separate conversations on her mobile phone. Seriously.  This is supposed to be a tense, urban, psycho thriller and opens with a posh lass on the phone for five minutes.

The two central performances are adequate without being good while the rest of the cast are introduced simply to pad out the running time and give Dyer someone to kill at regular intervals. Marmite actor Danny Dyer (you either love him or hate him) does his best, providing what little enjoyment there is to be had from the film (a scene between him and a sycophantic fan of Frankie’s a particular stand-out), and there is real chemistry between him and co-star Anna Walton but neither are served by a terrible script that defies sense or reason (just why does Frankie bother keeping Anna alive?) forcing Dyer’s performance to lurch from twitchy psycho, to Cockney hard man, to sympathetic bullied child-man and back again, like a demented cross between Sexy Beast’s terrifying Don Logan and Lenny from Of Mice And Men, while Walton spends most of the film being a bit wet before a last-minute telegraphed twist.  Both actors deserve better than this.

Plodding and po-faced, Deviation isn’t a film.  It’s an experiment in time dilation.    

David Watson

Writer/Director

JK Amalou

Writers

JK Amalou

Starring

Danny Dyer, Anna Walton

Country

UK

Running time

86 minutes

Year

2012