Do nice with a few chips

Last night and tonight I watched two British movies. One was good, one was bad.

Donkey Punch is a 2008 thriller involving the accidental death of a young girl during an orgy on a yacht. Sound good? ISN'T! The film falls flat on it's face, much like the young girl does after dying when punched on the neck whilst 'doing it doggy style' (A donkey punch).

The film begins with three Leeds girls on holiday in Mallorca to get over Tammi, one of the girls, break-up. They meet a bunch of off-duty naval crew and decide to go party on a yacht. There begins the disaster. The film tries to evoke movies such as Dead Calm, and the typical American slasher, but it's more Dead Crap. After taking ecstasy and smoking crack (yes, kids, CRACK) they decide to have an orgy. Due to my limited experience of crack, as in NONE, I can imagine it is hard to maintain an erection whilst on a drug that drives you into euphoria but then a depression so harsh that the only thing that cures it is sweet, sweet crack. This little blip aside, the sex festival misdemeanour that causes the death suddenly becomes so incredibly bad that they have to come up with a plausible cause of death. I thought of one in a second. They are on a yacht, with three floors, and the corpse has a broken neck. Maybe, just maybe, she fell from one of the massive decks to another, possibly breaking her neck on the fall. Instead, they decide to dump the body and try to kill each other.

This film completely lacks tension, and when the characters die you are cheering as their placid little faces will no longer have to ruin my movie watching time. It doesn't help that the boys are Old Glory wearing Raa's that I feel should die in the first place.
Don't bother with it, unless you're 13 and need to wank over something that doesn't look like porn but has tits and shagging in it.

The other film I watched was The Bank Job. Now before I get e-shouted down, I know this is a film with Jason Statham in, and I know he isn't one for creating films beyond violence and drugs, but this film is really quite good.

It's the story of the Baker Street Bank Robbery, apparently a robbery so famous that I'd never heard of it. I've heard of the Great Train Robbery, but never this, and apparently this had a higher collateral. Anyway, the gist of the story is Michael X, a black liberationist in the UK, has incriminating photos of a royal princess engaged in sex acts with girls. He uses these photos as blackmail in order to get away with crimes in the UK, but MI5 devise a plan to recover them from the safety deposit box in a bank vault by channeling a robbery to inexperienced criminals. It all goes tits up, and too much is taken from the vault, and the criminals realise they've been had.

The casting of the film is excellent, with every character having the persona of a wheeler-dealer well out of their depth. The few experienced criminals don't feature enough for you to care about them. One way of putting this is...Jason Statham doesn't punch someone until the last scene. He acts! And is pretty good at it. The strange view of the 70's containing sexy females only also means that the female cast is stunning. None of them can act their way our of a paper bag, but they're sexy, and my misogynistic view of the fairer sex means I was happy with their sexy input.

Roger Donaldson, the director, has a weird mix of films under his belt, with Cuban Missile Crisis movies, and Dante's Peak. He even directed Species. So he's reasonably well versed in different cinematic styles, and has shot this rather well. It does look like a long episode of Life on Mars, but that is not a bad thing. Quiffs and sideburns all round. A few anachronistic mistakes are to be forgiven, also. The 'true story' itself has been spiced up, a character here and a plot twist there, but it's all for the best.

The Bank Job is a good film, easy to watch, and interesting. It's story is really deep, so much that I'm surprised a film took this long.