Billy Murray (not to be confused with Bill Murray) of ITV’s The Bill fame, stars as British gangster John Morgan. John has recently come back into the country, and after a meeting with – and getting bit of pressure from – someone higher up the food chain, he decides to try to bring his family together by hosting a dinner party to meet his daughter’s new girlfriend. The dinner party doesn’t quite go as planned, and a few twists and turns later, John’s family are being terrorised by psychotic killers out for some revenge. There’s also a subplot with an ex-cop who wants revenge for his dad that ties in.
The film has obvious influences from Tarantino as it follows a similar structure, in terms of lots of dialogue and then saving most of its action for the final scenes. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t quite match up with this ambition – and that’s being very polite. The plot itself doesn’t do a very good job of out fleshing out the characters. The initial 45 minutes aren’t used productively at all and the dialogue just isn’t up the scratch to hold anyone’s attention. It tends to constantly be relying on C-bombs and F-bombs to get any point across, which after a while just seems lazy. All this means that none of the characters are likeable or relatable, which makes it really hard to care about them. This isn’t helped at all by the acting throughout which is wooden and comes across as phoned in.
It really feels like the director of the film had just accepted that this was bad and didn’t want to put any more time into. A single watch through revealed multiple issues that could easily be fixed in post-production. Some examples are: dialogue that was simply cut between too quickly not allowing for the illusion of thinking time and gaps in sentences where the audio just hasn’t been cropped properly. On top of this, there are ameuturish looking things like stock videos of the outside of the pub that completely ruin the pacing, something you expect to see in a sitcom rather than a feature film. There’s also a really odd choice where they cut back to a clip of advice a bartender gave about 10 minutes earlier. Again this is something you’d expect in comedy, or perhaps at the end of a very long film.
As the movie goes on, Nemesis unintentionally falls into the bracket of so bad that it’s good. The reactions, the dialogue, the terrible-looking action scenes late on, it’s all delightfully rubbish.
Release Date: March 29th
