Chances are you will have already seen "Dead Man Running", though you will probably know it by a different title - "Pusher" and "Run Lola Run" both spring to mind, though you might be able to think of some others. You may even have encountered the film in the past when it was a video game called "Grand Theft Auto", whose aesthetic it gently apes and whose content it just seems to downright plagiarise: characters charging around an urban environment stealing cars; driving to a contact; winning boxing matches; transporting some drugs - sound familiar? Very little of it necessarily has to unfold in a particular order and almost all of the time meagrely treading above a level of diverting.
"Dead Man Running" covers twenty-four or so hours in the life of Nick Kane (Tamer Hassan), who runs a travel agent which specialises in skiing trips to the Emirati territory of Dubai. He does this with Danny Dyer's character Bing. Reformed, we deduce, by a three year stretch in prison, Kane is now a bang-up decent chap: he take care of his mum; works hard to keep his partner Frankie (Monet Mazur) out of reverting back to the sex business and possesses a decent boxing track record from all the trophies and photographs we are allowed to observe in his dwelling. The fact his mother is wheel-chair bound allows us to empathise more with her without the film necessarily having to work especially hard to round her as a character.
Trouble crash-lands itself into Kane's world when an American gangster by the name of Thigo, played by rapper 50 Cent, flies to London himself to call in the debts the British wing of his criminal enterprise has been doling out to those in need on account of 2008's true-to-life financial crisis. Kane, a beneficiary of £100,000 of Thigo's money, has thus been ear-marked as a special case and is rudely given twenty-four hours to pay everything back, lest his mother is on the wrong end of Phil Davis' sawn-off shotgun wielding hitman, a character who spends the entire film perched on a sofa in her living room for when the hour comes. I suppose bundling her out of the house, in a van, the poor woman terrified, distanced from the sanctuary of her home and wheelchair, so as to take her to a nearby safe-house, while would have been more realistic, would have been just a bit too heavy for what the film is aiming for.
Thigo's economics propels the film into a series of set-pieces as Kane, in a mad dash, attempts to use all of his resources, as well as one or two of other people's, to try and raise the eye-watering sum. The film, being primarily a comedy, thus hinges on whether we are able to laugh at the scraps Hassan's character, Dyer in tow, gets into. These can, in some respects, and as stated, unfold in any particular order - the approach very reminiscent of, as stated, a session of Grand Theft Auto wherein one is charged with manoeuvring around a locality undertaking a variety of untoward tasks for sake of monetary gain. It would be wrong to say that what transpires induces sufficient laughs in order to commend the film as a comedy, but it would be equally wrong to say that it doesn't induce anything in the way of a smirk.
Too often, however, the events are propped up by a process of maddening logic on the characters' behalf, whereby they ingest, despite their predicament, cocaine; opt to take the slower, more conspicuous black taxi-cab up a motorway instead of a jaguar sports car and, perhaps most incredibly, opt to assault a petrol station clerk during their misadventure thus risking grossly unwanted police attention. Keeping score of how much Kane and Bing have thus far accumulated becomes a little game in itself; the film, produced by a series of high-flying footballers of the day, is missing a little graphic in the corner of the screen which keeps you up on the score. Also missing is a little clock which, rather than tick up to ninety, needs to tick down from one thousand four hundred and forty.
I was struck by a curious feeling, both astonishment and vindication in equal measure, when I researched the director, a certain Alex De Rakoff, after having seen the film and discovered he was responsible for that very brief full-motion-video sequence which opens the initial sequel to Grand Theft Auto in 1999. For the uninitiated, it is a pumping series of scenes wherein the character you eventually control in the game is depicting driving around a big city dodging cops; delivering goods; interacting with gangsters and getting paid. It took De Rakoff thirty seconds to construct that, those thirty seconds of which are elongated into sixty-odd minutes here - and I ask you: why?
