When posh young woman Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun) brings her boyfriend back to meet her callous banker dad (Tim Bentinck) and prissy mum (Carolyn Backhouse), lunch is rather spoiled when class warfare breaks out. The boyfriend Danny (Jack Roth), turns out to be not only a rude young chap with a broad Estuary accent, he’s also an armed robber.
Determined to fill in the chip on his shoulder and make daddy pay for all the banking bailout of 2008, he and his mates (Andrew Tiernan and Daniel Kendrick) tie up the family and threaten them with violence unless dad opens his home safe. But first Danny insists on giving them lectures about their moral turpitude while filming himself as jokey intertitles introduce flashbacks. All in all, the effect is like Guy Ritchie has remade Michael Haneke’s Funny Games after huffing old copies of the Socialist Worker.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if writer-director Joe Martin had a slightly more coherent message. As it is, all that righteous anger is undercut by the bloodletting nihilism of a last act that panders to the audience’s baser instincts. Elsewhere, there are some painfully pretentious interludes, including a would-be trippy mini-montage with a voiceover recitation of William Blake’s poem The Tyger, which is ironic because there’s a lack of fearful symmetry here. Jack Roth, son of Tim, has a certain wiry charisma, and Andrew Tiernan is even better as an embittered older man, but the rest of the cast flail with cartoonish caricatures, particularly of the ones playing upper-class gits.
