Since the success of Guy Ritchie in British film industry many writers and directors have tired and fail to copy his formula of gangsterism and comedy. Dead Man Running is no exception, a poor attempt of a film that should have been straight-to-DVD had it not had 50 Cent, had Rio Ferdinard and Ashley Cole financed the film or promoted on the BBC's Film Programme.Nick (Tamer Hassan) is an ex-con who is struggling to play his debts, looks after his recently disabled mother (Brenda Blethyn) and with his friend Bing (Danny Dyer) tries to see sky holidays to Dubai because, eh… because. He is also a man who owns a £100,000 debt to a ruthless American gangster, Mr. Thigo (50 Cent), a man struggling to get his money back since the credit crunch. He picks Nick to make an example of him, that he has to get £100,000 in 24 hours or he will kill him and his mother. Nick and Bing have to use every trick in the book and everything they can to get the money.Dead Man Running is just a cheap looking film attempting some stylish tricks and is filled with poor acting, action and comedy. The plot itself is just a rip off a Guy Ritchie film, some small time crook ends up crossing a big gangster and the crook has to pay him back quickly, that's what happened in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Rocknrolla, but at least those films have sub-plots. Alex De Rakoff is no Ritchie, he does not have his directional or writing abilities. There are some stylist moments in the beginning when Thigo talks about the effects of the credit crunch on dealers, using football commentary when a group of kids are transferring cocaine to a council estate and when Nick and Bing are driving up north. But it looks cheap: the few action scenes like the bare knuckle boxing being shot too close and cut too quickly to truly tell what is really happening.As a whole the film is very predictable and the plot turns and twists can be seen from a mile off. There is a ridiculous idea that Thigo has men all over London (despite being an American gangster) and been following Nick through a giant tracker in coat pocket and even if we can buy that he did not notice that, he sits on a train next to a teenager already on the train who is working for Thigo and he steals his money. That is just impossible. I could buy that some teenager steals the money simply through bad luck but no, that was too much plot convenience for the audience to suspend their disbelieve. There is too much luck and at the end the mother was able to kill her captor, so taking away what little tension there is.Except for one mildly funny joke the humour falls flat and the story as a whole is weak. It could have been an interesting to see a gangster who operates across borders, having his fingers in a lot of pies and working as a banker to major gangsters and operations to a lot of people, but no, that is ruined. De Rakoff admits that the character started of English but was turned into an American because of the credit crunch. But what really happened was Rakoff found out that 50 Cent was available, so rewrote the character to be America. His nationality made no different because he just operated like a British gangster we have seen in dozens of gangster films before hand.The acting is just sub-par. It is not good and most of the actors just phoned in there performances. Danny Dyer was not as annoying as he can be and he did not play the cockney hard man he normally plays. It was clear that 50 Cent was only on set for a couple of days and he has shown time and again he can not act. I would say go back to rapping but that would be just as bad.At best Dead Man Running is a generic Brit-gangster film we have seen time and again. It offers us nothing new and is not worth your time. It is a dull film that is stupid when you put any real world logic to it and you may as well watch a good gangster film again.

I recently viewed Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels, and thought it was a cinematic masterpiece. I watched Dead Man Running yesterday, when I saw that the two had a similar plot line. I wasn't expecting Dead Man Running to be as good of a movie as Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels, but I also wasn't expecting it to be almost as bad of a movie as Dave Eddy's Pocket Ninjas. The dialogue is rather lame, the twist is cliché and expected, and everything feels hand-me- down and second hand. Brenda Blethyn had a beautiful performance as Tammer Hassan's mother, which although was superb, didn't quite make up for 50 Cent's less than acceptable acting. Dead Man Running and Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels have the same situation with me as Corner Gas and Dan For Mayor. The Corner Gas/Dan For Mayor conundrum means that I enjoyed Corner Gas, but don't enjoy Dan For Mayor, although I want to. Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels is hands-down one of my all-time favourite movies, and Dead Man Running is hands-down one of my all-time least favourite movies. I really want to like Dead Man Running, but the dialogue, second-hand feeling, and clichés didn't do it for me. I give Dead Man Running a three of of ten.

I wasn't expecting great things from this movie and I wasn't disappointed. The plot is very two-dimensional but done reasonably well, the film is well-paced and directed competently with a fair bit going on in its 90-ish minute runtime. It's never going to trouble the Academy but it pretty much does what it says on the tin as a run-of-the-mill UK gangster flick.The performances leave a little bit to be desired, however. Danny Dyer, who now seems hopelessly typecast, really phones in his performance and it would be nice to see him given a role which might stretch him. If he keeps taking roles like this one, though, it ain't going to happen. Here Dyer is reunited with his co-star from 'The Business' (ten times the film that 'Dead Man Running' is, by the way) Tamer Hassan. Hassan, again, means well but again he's given very little to work with. It's a shame as both he and Dyer have, I feel, more to offer than this formulaic 'good-guys-gone-a-little-bad' buddy-buddy nonsense.The chief baddie is 'played' by Curtis 'fifty pence' Jackson and it's not good, people. I'm not a fan of his music but he undeniably has talent, just not on the boards. His performance is borderline embarrassing but thankfully he doesn't take up much screen time.Not a great movie, not a disaster either. Just average.I did chuckle when I saw the name of footballer Rio Ferdinand in the credits as an 'executive producer' and the Jar-Jar Binks lookalike even gets a dedicated (and very clunky) line in the script. Rio's got his insipid 'Number 5' online magazine going on and now fancies himself as a mover and shaker in the film world but someone really ought to take the big man to one side and quietly explain to him that he is not in any way 'cool', nor will he ever be. Stick to football, Rio, you're quite good at that (recent performances aside).

I didn't know what to expect from this film except that the poster made it look like an honest-to-goodness thriller that could've been made any time in the past 40 years, and that appealed to me. In the event, it's a well-played noir mostly set in London (though you get no real sense of the city, and it's a shame they had to show Big Ben) in which Nick (engagingly played by Tamer Hassan) has 24 hours to find £100,000 or he, and his mother (as always, a superb performance from Brenda Blethyn) will be 'buried in a shallow grave'. Well-paced, with a reasonable twist, it's only a shame that most of the dialogue is quite lame, and everything has a second-hand feel, but that's deliberate, I feel, and we need more movies like this that have a heart of noir while only seeking to entertain. The audience I saw it with, in Wandsworth, were thoroughly entertained.