Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Starring: Charlotte Kirk, Philip Winchester, Colm Meaney, Hoji Fortuna, Colin Egglesfield,
Stephanie Beacham, Sean Pertwee
After garnering early acclaim for Dog Soldiers and The Descent, director Neil Marshall spent much of the 2010s
working as a gun-for-hire in TV, including helming a couple of the most
lauded episodes of Game of Thrones. After his badly received Hellboy reboot (which is nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests),
Marshall appears to have rebooted his own career, now seemingly focussed
solely on making movies with his romantic and creative partner Charlotte Kirk. The partnership began badly with the tedious 2020 folk-horror The Reckoning, but Marshall and Kirk bounced back with their fun 2022 creature
feature The Lair. Their latest collaboration, Duchess, which the couple co-wrote with Simon Farr, is a disaster,
an intensely annoying gangster revenge thriller that's so bad it makes
Guy Ritchie look like Don Siegel.
Kirk plays Scarlett, a foul-mouthed cockney pickpocket who falls for
American diamond smuggler Rob (Philip Winchester). This diamond
geezer introduces Scarlett to a world of glamour she previously only
dreamt of. But it's a world filled with danger too, with Rob constantly
being shot at by rivals. It's apparently not a world filled with cops
though, as the police are nowhere to be seen despite so much loud
gunfire in public spaces.
When a diamond deal leaves Scarlett, who has now been given the
nickname "Duchess", for dead in the Spanish desert, she uses the skills
Rob taught her to seek revenge on those who betrayed her, enlisting the
aid of Rob's right-hand men Baraka (Hoji Fortuna) and Danny
(Marshall regular Sean Pertwee).
It's not exactly a novel premise, but with a bit of panache there's no
reason why it shouldn't make for a fun piece of action cinema.
Unfortunately Marshall's idea of panache is to imitate the
post-Tarantino stylings of Guy Ritchie and his many imitators. Every
tiresome British gangster cliché is rolled out in what is essentially
the sort of straight to VOD movie that usually stars the likes of Danny
Dyer or Craig Fairbrass. It's the type of half-assed movie designed to
be half-watched through drunken eyes before you fall asleep into your
post-pub vindaloo on a Friday night.
Kirk delivers one of those always irritating narrative voiceovers so
beloved of this sub-genre, and we even get the ultimate cliché of an in
media res prologue that pauses on a freeze frame as Kirk's Scarlett
intones "You're probably wondering how a bird like me ended up in this
pickle," or something along those lines. The score by Paul Lawler is a lazy pastiche of '60s spy movies and '70s blaxploitation.
Every time a new character is introduced the screen will freeze as their
name flashes on screen in the same yellow '70s evoking font that all
these movies opt for, and most of them will launch into a tedious
monologue explaining their backstory.
It takes a full hour of Duchess's tortuous two hour run time before anything resembling a plot kicks
in. That first hour is spent pointlessly introducing a never-ending
stream of cartoonish characters, from Stephanie Beacham's
vicious mob boss to Scarlett's estranged Irish dad (Colm Meaney,
rehashing his Gangs of London shtick), most of whom play no substantial part in the overall
narrative.
The film's one asset is Kirk, who fully commits to the part and as she
previously displayed in The Lair, is every inch the convincing action heroine. But the film's action
scenes never exploit her compelling physicality; they're as bland as the
climactic shootouts you'll find in reruns of '70s British shows The Sweeney and The Professionals. There's also something a bit Howard Hughes/Jane Russell in how
Marshall shoots his missus, constantly sticking her in the most
revealing of outfits and introducing her ass-first in most of her
scenes. It's practically an admission that the film has nothing else to
offer other than its leading lady's looks.
Duchess is in UK/ROI cinemas
from August 9th and VOD from August 12th.
