I didn't know what to expect from this film except that the poster made it look like an honest-to-goodness thriller that could've been made any time in the past 40 years, and that appealed to me. In the event, it's a well-played noir mostly set in London (though you get no real sense of the city, and it's a shame they had to show Big Ben) in which Nick (engagingly played by Tamer Hassan) has 24 hours to find £100,000 or he, and his mother (as always, a superb performance from Brenda Blethyn) will be 'buried in a shallow grave'. Well-paced, with a reasonable twist, it's only a shame that most of the dialogue is quite lame, and everything has a second-hand feel, but that's deliberate, I feel, and we need more movies like this that have a heart of noir while only seeking to entertain. The audience I saw it with, in Wandsworth, were thoroughly entertained.
Review of Dead Man Running
