Outlanders

Stars: Jakub Tolak, Przemyslaw Sadowski, Alexis Raben, Shaun Dingwall, Joe Tucker, Damon Younger, Olegar Fedoro

Director: Dominic Lees

An increasingly unlikely chain of events towards the end lets down a good first hour and detracts from the impact of this study of the exploitation of illegal European immigrants on London's building sites.

Travelling to England from his native Poland to find his brother Jan (Sadowski), a football megstar until he broke his leg, Adam (Tolak) finds his handsome sibling to be one of the bosses on a site where construction workers labour in dangerous conditions, always being promised money, but never getting it, until Jan blows to whistle on them and they are arrested by police, to be deported back to their own countries, while Jan ferries in a fresh crew of hapless migrants looking for a better life.

Despite meeting Anna (Raben), a Russian girl (also illegal) with a daughter back home, Adam is soon swept up in his brother's shady activities. After a migrant worker falls to his death (finished off by Jan), Adam finds himself having to ditch his brother's car, unaware until the last minute that there's a body in the boot.

Initially an insightful look at the plight of these workers, the film falls apart when the melodramatic aspects of its plot kick in. A love scene is rather embarrassingly done, and characters begin to behave without logic. Why would both brothers not just flee the scene of a hit-and-run towards the end? Why would they want to kill a witness to the murder and not just put him on a plane to Russia? And why would the improbably ubiquitous police inspector (Dingwall) turn soft at the final reckoning? The basic idea, though, is one well worth bringing to our attention.

David Quinlan

USA 2008. UK Distributor: Miracle Communications. Colour.
100 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.

Review date: 20 Oct 2008