duchess
Director: Neil Marshall
Written by Neil Marshall and Charlotte Kirk
With Charlotte Kirk, Philip Winchester, Colm Meaney and Hoji Fortuna
Running time 113 minutes
In cinemas and on demand from August 12th

by Alex Rudolph, Editor

Whatever happens, he has The descentNeil Marshall has directed post-apocalyptic action films, sandal films, key epics of game of Thrones And HannibalA Hellboy Film that messed everything up, but had some very good scary sequences emerging from the chaos. But he did it again The descentthe most effective horror film of its decade. If you write and direct a horror film that was great at the time, but is even more impressive today in retrospect because no one else managed to capture the tension and claustrophobia of that film, I will listen. Marshall’s filmography since The descent was unpredictable, but the Hannibal episode that introduced the character Francis Dolarhyde to the series and helped ground a series that was becoming a little too abstract. It went in many directions, none as strong as The descent or his first film, Dog soldiersbut they were all at least a little bit interesting.

If this introductory text felt long, you know it was a form of procrastination. I didn’t want to write the sentence “Neil Marshall made an incredibly boring, magical film.” But he did, and it depresses me a little, so I wrote the sentence.

duchess is the third film in which he stars and co-wrote with Charlotte Kirk, his creative partner and wife. The first two, The settlement And The cavewere horror films that, while not good, provided interest in seeing what Marshall and Kirk could accomplish while staying under the horror umbrella. They have another film in post-production that Marshall said was influenced by yellow. Between horror films, Marshall and Kirk have created this British crime thriller, and if the genre shift sounds ambitious, if the transfer of Marshall’s old mastery of suspense to a story about an illegal diamond trade seems full of possibilities and you, like me, think, “Wow, that’s a good fit,” then I’m sorry.

I’m sorry about that, because that’s the kind of movie Marshall and Kirk made: After the opening scene abruptly jumps from sex to violence, Kirk’s character Duchess literally says, “Wait a minute, I’m getting ahead of myself—to really understand where this all began, you’re going to have to go back a little bit.”

And I’m sorry, because the whole movie is full of such cliches. A few minutes into the flashback, Duchess is pickpocketing in a bar and meets Rob (Phillip; Winchester), the action freezes, Rob’s name appears on the screen and Duchess says, “This is Rob McNaughton, the future love of my life. Ex-Marine, ex-con, excellent in bed, as it turns out, and, oh yeah, damn dangerous.” Rob has a whole crew and they’re all dangerous. They met in foreign prisons and on mercenary jobs and often say “fuck.”

Does this mean anything to you? A British woman and an American say “fuck” to each other? Is it surprising to see an old British woman swear? Would it seem so novel to you if she stabbed someone in the neck that you wouldn’t find the immediate repetition boring? Can you draw any real insight from such banal dialogue as “You can’t choose where you come from, but you can choose where you go?” Do you like people shooting at each other, even if the action is filmed in such a way that you can’t tell where anyone is in relation to the others, and each actor, however well the scenes are staged, might as well have been filmed in different decades? Are you old? True Romance And Grab DVDs scratched?

Marshall has made a Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn film, which means he takes the recycled crime cliches of the 70s and 80s and recycles them again. When Ritchie and Vaughn are there, when they make films like Jack, Queen, King, GRASthey’re able to use these tropes, slap a lot of old gibberish on everything, and throw in enough music video-style flourishes that you don’t mind regurgitating it because it’s all so fast and so much fun. You don’t mind not seeing anything as strong as The long Good Friday or Get Carter because four wandering gangs just invaded a tiny London apartment and blew it to pieces Alexis Zorba Theme.

duchess is not original, but it is not fun either. There are long, slow passages where nothing stops you from checking whether Mona-Lisa is streamed everywhere.

The plot is typical of a British crime thriller: Duchess gets into the illegal diamond trade, even though she knows how dangerous it is, and then it gets dangerous. She knows she can’t trust certain people, and then she realises she can’t trust them. New characters are still treated like this 70 minutes into the film: “Freeze frame, their name pops up on the screen and Duchess makes a little joke about how they like to swear or whatever”, but it doesn’t matter because they’re all the same person.

The only unique thing on display here is Marshall’s rare version of the male gaze. His camera is staring at Kirk’s character, but she’s his partner, so you feel like the guy next to you is constantly leaning over and whispering onstage, “Look at my wife’s ass. Look at it.” And I’m sorry for that, too.

I’m not sorry because I have anything to do with the film. I obviously don’t. There’s just something about Marshall’s early hits that seemed to guarantee him to keep making good art. Maybe the apologetic feeling comes from that Tyra Banks rant: “We were rooting for you.” Maybe I hate being the umpteenth person to say that Marshall might not come back, that his failures aren’t even interesting anymore, that the little good parts in a film like Hellboy do not appear in the new work.

A rough overview of the stages of disappointment could well overlap with Neil Marshall’s career: “This guy is good” to “This guy is great!” to “This guy is not what I expected, but he’s OK” to “This guy is mediocre, but I’m willing to hold out as long as there are still sparks of the work I was so excited about in the first place” to “Will the original guy ever come back?” After duchessI don’t know if I will discover any more levels.