It’s a British film so obviously it deals with drugs, crime, sink estates and respect. It would be nice to see some sci-fi or even a light heated period comedy, but bad slags are cheap so that’s what the British film industry will go with.
The film opens with a beaten up young man talking to Barry off ‘Auf Wiedersein Pet’. Barry has retrained as a police detective and he’s interviewing Harvey, a young man recently released from a year long stretch for dealing drugs. We go the familiar non-linear narrative route, so he tells Barry that it’s a long story and we soon dissolve to a flashback ‘six months before’…
Harvey is a chatty chap and provides a lot of narration about the drugs trade in his estate. He’s supposedly clean, but the local drug lord gets him sent down for a year so that the police make their quota and the drug lord can be left in peace. After getting out, Harvey decides to get his own back on the drug lord with his crew of three friends, including Ramsay Bolton.
All three are struggling but soon take to Harvey’s plan to rob the drug lord of his takings and to invest the money in a hash café in Amsterdam - it’s good that they have worthy ambitions. He also has to reconnect with his nurse girlfriend, who’s a bit tiresome, and to train the gang so as to flesh out the plot so that enough time passes before we return to Barry in the interview room where all the clever twists are explained.
‘The Rise’ of the title is a working man’s club, and Harvey heard in prison that they have a safe with loads of cash in it. If this seems like a flimsy prospect for a job it also serves as the premise of the film, so keep quiet.
The gang hone their skills in a manner of elaborate an ultimately pointless ways before the heist is on. Will they get the cash and a new worthless life, or will the mild drug lord win the day?
If you liked ‘Oceans 11, 12 and 13’ you may like this, but be warned, it’s ‘Ocean’s 0.5’ at best. The heist is pretty straightforward and although it seemingly goes off the rails, there was never any doubt that a few planned wrong foots would save the day.
The characters were all wafer thin, with it being a mistake to hang the whole film on Harvey who was dull and unengaging. I didn’t care if he got the money or the girl and the whole enterprise was like a bunch of rats fighting over a rotten chicken leg.
Ramsay was a bit underused with this clunker coming out a year before he started in ‘Game of Thrones’. I’m guessing this effort was left of his CV.
There wasn’t much in the way of invention and I didn’t believe in the actions of Barry’s police detective who seemed to make a call on judgement rather than base his decision on the evidence. It looked like he only worked a day on the film, so he probably just wanted to get home.
You may find some form of entertainment hidden within this mess but to be honest I wasn’t engaged at all and the big revelations barely registered on the ‘So what’ meter. These criminals feeding off each other features do nothing for me, and if they were all sucked into a black hole after five minutes I’d have no complaints.
Overall a workmanlike British heist that failed to deliver the goods.
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