Three and Out

Dir: Jonathan Gershfield
Starring: Mackenzie Crook, Colm Meaney, Gemma Aterton

Commuters cannot have failed to noticed Miss Mackenzie Crook’s weaselly features poking out at them every 50 yards, promoting this new Britflick. So, to what do we owe this sudden intrusion from the man who so moved us in Sex Lives of the Potato Men? Well, not a whole lot because, whilst not inferior to that horrible effort, Three And Out is a shambolic mess caught in a place between raucous black comedy and gloomy melodrama.

The apparent plot turns on Crook’s Paul, an insular Tube-driver-cum-aspiring-novelist; he hatches an ingenious plan to fulfil the macabre ‘three and out’ rule of the Underground, which allows a driver who kills three people in a month to be pensioned off for life. Paul, having accidentally (and improbably) bumped off two of the requisite three, sets about finding a suitable candidate for his cash-in. He finds it in Tommy (the ever-reliable Meaney), a tramp down on his luck and about to jump off the Holborn Viaduct. Paul persuades Tommy to put his suicide plans on halt, and brings him under his wing. Tommy, however, has his own conditions, and that is where the ‘adventure’ begins.

The film’s problem is its lack of commitment to a specific genre. Is it meant to be a crowd-pleasing Friday-nighter (elements of this break through in a hilarious episode in Liverpool featuring, bizarrely, Kerry Katona), or a heart-rending meditation about reconciliation for past wrongs (the main action re-locates the twosome to Cumbria for a re-union of Tommy and his estranged family)? This failure to decide on a message nags at the viewer, and renders the unpalatable ending utterly pointless. And the less said about Anthony Sher’s hideous cameo the better.

Out Friday 25th

4/10