Emma Rigby: 'Plastic' A Shallow, Flashy British Crime Caper

Plastic: Film Review

The Bottom Line

Ocean's Five.

Release date

April 30 (U.K.)

Starring

Ed Speleers, Will Poulter, Alfie Allen, Emma Rigby, Sebastian De Souza, Thomas Kretschmann

Director

Julian Gilbey

Shallow, flashy British crime caper relies on the charms of an attractive young cast, including "Games of Thrones" regular Alfie Allen and "Downton Abbey" co-star Ed Speleers.

LONDON – All champagne and strippers, conspicuous consumption and witless machismo, Plastic is a contemporary British heist movie that already feels dated, as if it were made before the bubble burst on Guy Ritchie’s comic book gangster voyeurism. Director Julian Gilbey earned broad acclaim for his handsome Scotland-set kidnap thriller A Lonely Place to Die in 2011, but his fifth feature is a much more cliched affair that seems to be entirely composed of half-remembered quotes from other, smarter, better movies.

An attractive young cast led by Downton Abbey regular Ed Speleers and Game of Thrones co-star Alfie Allen should help fill seats when Plastic opens in Britain and Ireland this week, boosted by the distribution and marketing muscle of Paramount. But overseas returns seem far from secure for this cheap-looking British twist on the Ocean’s Eleven formula.

Smooth-talking Conan O’Brien-like Sam (Speleers) is an entrepreneurial London college student who runs a four-man business empire of youthful con artists specializing in buying and selling luxury goods with stolen credit cards. Their crimes are mostly peaceful and victimless, until the reckless behavior of arrogant Yatesey (Allen) puts the gang on a violent collision course with ruthless Euro-gangster Marcel (Thomas Kretschmann). Forced into a Faustian pact with Marcel, Sam and his team urgently need to come up with £2 million ($3.4 million) or face imminent liquidation.

Meanwhile, Sam has been trying to secure a date with Frankie (Emma Rigby), a striking blonde beauty who just happens to work for a big credit card company. Recruiting Frankie to a life of crime with laughable ease, the gang embark on their most audacious score to date, flying out en masse to a glitzy Miami hotel for a sting operation targeting big spenders. When Yatesey’s volatile misbehavior again sabotages this plan, the scheme is suddenly reworked into a transatlantic jewel heist involving private jets, fake Middle Eastern princes, hotel shoot-outs and lethal betrayals. At this point, the script tips over from implausible adolescent fantasy into preposterous, jarringly illogical farce.

Plastic makes a token bid at contemporary social comment, with Sam and his team claiming the current economic recession as justification for their get-rich-quick scams. But otherwise, the script is woefully devoid of psychological or political context. Likewise the thinly sketched protagonists, who appear to have no family, no private life, no interests at all outside this oddly mismatched gang. They are surrounded by even more cartoonish villains, swarthy hoodlums and monosyllabic mobsters steeped in B-movie cliche but with no hint of redeeming, Tarantino-esque irony. One of the crime bosses is simply called Mr X. Yes, it’s that lazy.

Most damningly, the main characters are all such uniformly unlikable, bone-headed, sexist jerks that it is hard to feel emotionally engaged long enough to follow their increasingly absurd antics. The final heist sequence is painfully contrived, relying on comically incompetent high-end jewelers who never stop to question why they are handing over a fortune in diamonds to a gang of 20-year-olds in bad wigs. If the film-makers intended this cautionary thriller to be a morality tale, they forgot to add any moral component.

Plastic claims to be based on a true story, a boast that feels evermore fanciful as the clumsy plot unravels. But no matter, because this film’s thin charms lie not in its authenticity but in its zippy energy, good-looking cast and mild sprinkling of action. Adolescent males, Anglophile pop-culture geeks and hard-core Game of Thrones fans may be sucked into theaters by the glitzy promise of glamorous bad-boy antics. But afterward, like several of the characters here, they may leave feeling conned and cheated.

Plastic review: Alfie Allen and Will Poulter in charmless heist thriller

Emma Rigby brings a certain earthy charm to the role of obligatory hot girl tagalong Frankie, but she's there solely to be alternately ogled and threatened.

Hollyoaks Em mortified by first screen sex scene

EMMA Rigby had to text her mum to warn her about the sex scene in her new movie.
The former Hollyoaks star strips off to bed hunk Ed Speleers in Brit flick Plastic.

Plastic Review

Former Hollyoaks actress Emma Rigby flits between awkward emotion and eye candy, put in revealing beachwear and made to pout as much as possible – something that just looks ridiculous for such a tense film.

Plastic, review: 'fantastically boring'

Meanwhile, Emma Rigby, late of Hollyoaks, thanklessly works the jiggling shift.

Film review: Plastic (15)

To the US we must go, they figure, where these young things can wear pastels or, in Rigby's case, not much while director Julian Gilbey can add swish visuals to distract from the lamentable dialogue.

Review: Plastic (2014)

Not only is every inch of the narrative – and its many twists and turns – utterly predictable, but the characters are nothing more than one dimensional decorations (none more so than former Hollyoaks star Emma Rigby, who spends the majority of her screen time sporting the skimpiest of clothing) and the dialogue reprehensible.

Plastic Movie Review

The premise isn't bad, but the script is packed with coincidental things that make it utterly impossible to believe. Frankie's job is one of these, as is the fact that Rafa looks just like the Prince of Brunei. And of course, since the plot needs some third-act suspense, Yatesey suddenly turns out to be a careless idiot. None of these things make any sense, leaving everything about the film feeling gratuitous, including the sunshiny beauty of the Miami Beach setting and the presence of inexpressive actress Rigby. Plastic, indeed.

Review of Plastic

Their designer wardrobe changes with every scene. There's even time for Rigby to go all Bo Derek in a swimsuit by the sea. It helps paint a perfect picture of vapidity and a showy sense of entitlement.

Plastic

It's all pretty tiresome, and what could have been a bearable Guy Ritchie-like geezer romp ends up something on a par with 2001's 51st State – a film so bad, I still get flashbacks more than 12 years after seeing it.

New Release Review - Plastic

Plastic could well be subtitled Ocean's 14, that number representative of the mental age of the film's target audience. If you asked the average 14-year-old British male what they'd like to see in a film, they'd probably answer with the various components that make up Julian Gilbey's film: wall to wall glamour models and ex Hollyoaks actresses in miniscule bikinis, a soundtrack of pounding dance music, over the top shootouts and moronic comedy. For all these extreme elements, the movie is deathly dull, the only energy on display coming from the many unsubtle placements of a popular caffeine heavy soft drink.

Plastic

But despite likeable turns from the four leads, the characters are simply drawn, especially pouty love interest Frankie (Emma Rigby from ‘Hollyoaks’), who is woefully under-written, -used and -dressed. (Note to filmmakers: casting a woman in a small role as a DCI does not balance things out.)

'Plastic' (2014) directed by Julian Gilbey

There's Frankie (Emma Rigby), who depressingly functions entirely as eye-candy for the guys to clash cocks over. She has next to zero involvement in the central plot, can't act worth a damn and is primarily there to walk around in a bikini behind a pair of pouty pneumatic lips - a panacea for the Zoo Magazine crowd the film is clearly targeted at.

Plastic Review

To counteract the questionable ethics of the piece, sadly the acting isn’t quite strong enough to make amends, with Rigby the key offender. Clenching your jaw and staring out into the distance is okay once, but after a while you can’t help but question if that truly constitutes as acting. She isn’t blessed with a very well-crafted character either, as one of many badly written female roles, most of which are just there to be conned in one way or the other, be it financially, or into bed.

Plastic - Review

Emma Rigby - whose shifting accent (at one point Estuary, at another, Corrie) and inability to deliver even the most basic line of dialogue are overshadowed only by her having the expressive range of the product of a low-budget computer animation studio.

The Reel Review - Plastic starring Ed Speelers, Will Poulter and Emma Rigby