Straightheads

What was Gillian Anderson thinking when she signed for this film? The actress had been quietly forging a post-Scully reputation as a respected and varied actress, with roles in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ and the acclaimed BBC adaptation of Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’. So why would she agree to star in this superficial revenge fantasy, which plays out like a ‘Nuts’-generation ‘X-Files’ geek’s wet dream gone wrong? One can only imagine that she was offering her services for the greater good of the filmgoing public, in a vain attempt to inject a drop of plausibility into writer-director Dan Reed’s half-baked script. Or to counter the stupifying one-dimensionality of her co-star, Danny Dyer, usually to be found flying the flag for English moronity in Nick Love films.

Anderson plays Alice, a middle-class London career woman who lures ‘bit-of-rough’ security system installer, Adam (Dyer) to a glamorous party at a countryside mansion before seducing him with some bizarre chin-sucking in the woods. Unfortunately, their pleasure is short-lived, as they are savagely attacked on the drive home, leaving them physically and emotionally scarred, and with a bloodthirsty desire to settle the score against their assailants. From here, the film is a shallow study of the ‘intoxicating allure of violence', with a few gratuitous tit shots thrown in for good measure. The characters have as much psychological depth as tyre skid marks, and Adam and Alice’s transformation from law-abiding citizens – or ‘straightheads’ – to rifle-wielding vigilantes is so sudden it’s absurd. The few fleeting moments of suspense created in the build-up to the highly unpleasant (but occasionally imaginative) assault scenes are insufficient redemption. Rebecca Davies