Director: J.K. Amalou
Starring: Danny Dyer, Anna Walton
Running Time: 90 mins
Certificate: 15
Extras: Making of…
Synopsis: When nurse Amber (Walton) is kidnapped by escaped murderer Frankie (Danny Dyer), she finds herself trapped in a psychological game of cat and mouse…
As we all know, if you want someone to play the quintessential cockerney geeeeezah, you get Danny Dyer. If Ray Winstone, Jason Statham or Bob Hoskins aren’t available. Danny knows this and has made a career of it, so it’s nice to see him trying something new. In DEVIATION, Dyer plays Frankie, an escaped killer who car-jacks mother and nurse Amber (Anna Walton) and holds her hostage as he makes good his getaway.
The film is a two-hander between Dyer and Walton, with the odd supporting character popping up to serve two purposes: to give Amber a hope of escape and then to be quickly stabbed to death by Frankie. So the vast majority of the film regards the relationship between the nurse and her captor. Walton is utterly convincing as the detainee on the road trip from Hell, who just wants to get back to her daughter. She doesn’t play the screaming damsel at all, in fact does all the things that a viewer would scream at her to do, like attempt escape at the right points and attack Frankie when the opportunity arises. Director/screenwriter Amalou does a great job in giving the character of Amber the right responses so the audience can’t help but see accept the bleakness of her situation. But then we come to the main problem of with the film.
Danny Dyer says in the Making Of (the one bonus feature on this disc, and really not worth 20 minutes of your life) that he chose this part as it was unlike anything he’s ever done. Fair dos. The problem is he plays it like everything he’s ever done. Frankie may be a complex individual, but Dyer plays him the same as every character he’s ever portrayed, rendering the audience forever distanced and unable to take him seriously. The first time we see Frankie, he leaps into Amber’s car, holds a razor to her face and says ‘Don’t move, unless you want an Arabian smile’. From that moment on, the unintentional laughs keep coming, and no matter how much tension Amalou attempts to build, it’s always subdued by Dyer’s ridiculous performance. From the get-go, he wears a glazed expression, like a confused cockney puppy awaking from a deep slumber. He throws in occasional mannerisms to remind us that he’s unhinged, such as a maniacal laugh and grasping his head in moments of internal anguish (because that’s what mental people do, we’ve seen it on Holby City). His dialogue doesn’t help him much, mind. When Amber asks why he hasn’t killed her yet, he replies, ‘Just making you have nightmares about me in the afterlife.’ When Amber isn’t screaming for help, she’s giving him sympathetic looks, which could either be to connote the caring nature of a nurse, or Walton herself pitying Dyer’s doomed attempts at ‘acting.’
Were Frankie played by an unknown, DEVIATION may well have been a just-above-average thriller. But with Danny at the wheel, it’s just too daft to be frightening. Despite Walton’s fine performance and Amalou’s able direction, this is a Dyer effort.
DEVIATION is available on DVD from 27th February
