Comes a Bright Day

Stars: Craig Roberts, Imogen Poots, Kevin McKidd, Timothy Spall, Geoff Bell, Josef Altin, Geoff Bell

Director: Simon Aboud

Submarine star Roberts (a tad too young, perhaps, but amiable and up to the not-too-demanding demands of his role) is dispatched from the five-star London hotel where he works to have an expensive wristwatch attended to at a posh jewellers.

There, along with the owner Spall and his salesgirl Poots, he is taken hostage when McKidd and Altin hold up the Mayfair store in a heist that goes wrong. And it also turns bloody when the shooting starts and the police surround the premises, transforming the bungled burglary into a hostage situation

Roberts predicament is tempered or possibly spiced up by the fact that the ambitious lad has already fallen for Poots: the ending becomes all the more predictable as a result even while McKidd continues to lose it spectacularly and Altin pays for his cowardice.

Its shot in wide screen (somewhat unnecessarily in my view, given the deliberately claustrophobic jewellery store setting of the key action) and writer and first-time feature film director Aboud does a competent enough job in bringing his unspectacular TV episode-style part romance, part thriller screenplay - to adequate but hardly stimulating life.

Aboud names his ultimately inept villains Cameron and Clegg who said satire was dead?

That said, what we get is a nostalgic throwback to the days when the British B feature ruled the lower half of double bills. Then such movies usually starred past-their-prime Hollywood actors whom most moviegoers had forgotten were still alive.

Here the cast is entirely British with Spall stealing the acting honours with a witty display of elegant under-acting.

(Since the directors father-in-law is Paul McCartney, Mr Aboud earns my sincere thanks for not decorating his thriller with his father-in-laws music).

Alan Frank

UK 2012. UK Distributor: Soda Pictures. Colour.
87 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.

Review date: 08 Jul 2012