Danny is the lead singer in a band. Along with his two best mates, Daz and Rusty, he manages to get caught up with some local gangsters over some confusion involving loan sharks, the band’s van and the title deeds to some prime riverfront property in Middlesborough. The only way he can seem to extricate himself is to team up with local greyhound racer Pat Lalley to train a winning greyhound to race against and beat the greyhound of gang boss Dave Courtney at Peterborough’s Fengate Stadium, if only he can live long enough to get there.
*****
Six Bend Trap seems to be in the process of being renamed as Thugs, Mugs and Dogs, which tells you a good deal more about what to expect from the film than the current title, though helps not one jot in raising the quality, nor punter expectations, for what is essentially a derivative, muddled, incompetent knock off of Lock, Stock… and Snatch.
The film is not without some initial promise, possessing a modest number of actors with a solid grounding in British TV (and one pneumatic actress with a solid grounding in adult entertainment) and a story with at least some effort having been applied towards building an intertwined narrative. Unfortunately it quickly starts to flounder, suffering at the hands of some genuinely mediocre acting and script work and progressing towards a climax that carries precisely no tension and fails to hold our interest or attention.
For the most part, the cast are wholly out of their depth. Dave Courtney as gang boss Gordy holds his own with a respectable degree of menace and Martin Owen is passable as notional protagonist Danny, but there is nothing here of any real heft or conviction. Too often there are awkward pauses during sequences of dialogue, with actors noticeably waiting for their turn to speak, rather than trying to convey a convincing sense of layered, overlapping dialogue. The aforementioned adult entertainment star, Cathy Barry (Diary of a MILF 10), is conspicuously woeful, with several other bit-part players giving her a run for her money in the “not really up to the task” stakes.
Although there is nothing necessarily wrong with going for the Lock, Stock.. and Snatch approach of matching a group of easy going, but vaguely dim guys with an interlocking story that swiftly spirals out of control, the director has to be able to manage the proceedings and keep things light and mobile. One minute you have a local fixer-cum transvestite helping Danny find something he needs, all played very light-hearted, the next a woman comes downstairs to find her husband dead, tied to a chair with his legs having been cut off. The ensuing funeral ceremony is played broadly for laughs, looking for black humour amidst the morbid proceedings. These abrupt and unpleasant shifts in tone are no doubt meant to mark the film out as dark and gritty, but instead it feels lost, drifting along without a clear sense of identity. Matters are not helped by pacing and length. You simply cannot have a crime caper film like this running to 2 hours 15 minutes, there just isn’t enough incident to justify the length, nor sufficient quality to keep our attention.
One quote on the DVD sleeve describes the film as the best British crime film since Snatch, which is a stretch to say the least. Two gruesome death scenes and a couple of violent confrontations, along with a liberal peppering of profanity, do not a gritty, compelling drama make. It must of course be acknowledged that any director can only work with what he has in terms of budget, script and actors, but when all three of those let you down then you must have at least enough self-awareness to realise your limitations and keep it short and tightly structured.
A slightly sprawling, occasionally incoherent mess, then. Virtually no visible acting proficiency, a plot that borrows heavily from The Long Good Friday, Lock, Stock.. and Snatch in terms of plots beats and tone, but fails singularly to come within a million miles of their respective quality and an end product best left on the shelf. It’s never much fun to be this scathing and I recognise that a lot of hard work will have gone into making Six Bend Trap, but I cannot pretend it’s a great film when it patently isn’t. It is out on DVD now, though I wouldn’t if I were you. Feel free to watch the trailer below, though it is NSFW.
Extras: Trailer, Outtakes, Documentary (not available for review).
[Rating:1/5]
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuD1U7fojSM’]
