Plastic

Stars: Ed Speleers, Alfie Allen, Will Poulter, Sebastian De Souza, Emma Rigby, Thomas Kretschmann, Graham McTavish, Kate Magowan

Director: Julian Gilbey

A cross between a Brit crime flick and a Hollywood scam movie, appropriately set in both London and Miami, but with a plot, supposedly based on a true story, that's too silly to lend the film any real suspense.

Four likely lads (Simon Baker-lookalike Speleers, Allen, Poulter and De Souza) are making money, lots of it, from credit card scams and identity theft. But they come unstuck when they steal a suitcase belonging to a particularly nasty gangster (Kretschmann) who tracks them to their lair and demands £200,000 a month or £2million in cash to get him off their backs. A bit excessive even by gangland standards, you might think, but at any rate the boys choose the latter, enlisting credits exchange worker Frankie (Rigby), whom Speleers fancies, and heading for Miami.

Here they launch a scam to rob a diamond company, whose executive's naiveté boggles the mind.

The success of this unlikely heist, however, is jeopardised by there being no honour among thieves.

The director throws in some strip-club nudity, a bit of coke-sniffing and a gun-blasting shootout at the end, though I'm still trying to work out how two gangs ended up in the same hotel room, or how the police failed to track down and arrest one of the quartet at the end. Still, go along with all this and you'll be mildly entertained. Rigby's a stunning looker and can act too, while the other performances are all OK.

David Quinlan

UK 2014. UK Distributor: Paramount. Colour (unspecified).
102 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

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

Review date: 29 Apr 2014