Martin Campbell reunites with Eva Green for a crime comedy that plays like something found at the back of a video shop in 1998. It looks expensive and moves briskly, and Samuel L. Jackson enjoys himself; nobody else does, us included.
Martin Campbell has spent thirty years making films that know where to put the camera. GoldenEye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006) each brought Bond back from the dead, and neither is confusing for a second. Just Play Dead is a much smaller job: a 97-minute crime comedy from a script by Dan Gordon, about a marriage and a death that is not what it looks like. Samuel L. Jackson is the husband, Eva Green is the wife, and the title gives away the trick. The reviews so far are few and unkind, and we are not going to be the ones to rescue it.
What Gordon has written is the kind of film that was everywhere in the late nineties, after Pulp Fiction (1994) had shown that crooks could talk, and it has not been updated since. The supporting cast come with labels rather than names: a Judge (Carlo Spano), a Sheik (César Martel), a Mr. Brody (Dar Dash), a Dr. Castro (Paulo Rivera), a Sister Rachel (Nicole Ansari-Cox). Each is a type with one trait, brought on when the plot needs turning and put away afterwards. We were bored by the second of them and irritated by the fourth, because the film plainly believes a colourful name is the same thing as a character, and it keeps introducing new ones rather than doing anything with the old.
Jackson is the exception, and the critics who have written about the film so far noticed it too. He plays Jack Wolfe as a man who finds the whole business funny, which it occasionally is when he is talking, and he gives every line the same unhurried relish he gave far better lines thirty years ago. We laughed at him three or four times and were grateful each time. Green has less to work with. Nora Wolfe is a wife in a crime comedy, and the film never finds her anything more particular to be, so Green does what she can with a look and a pause. María Pedraza’s Bianca, Eoin Macken’s Dani and Jason Fernández’s Chad fill out the main cast, and are handsome and hard to tell apart.
It looks, at least, as though money was spent. Giles Nuttgens shoots it glossily, everything clean and well lit, and the locations are the sort a producer books because they photograph well, and they do. Lola Villaescusa’s costumes give Green things to wear that the script does not give her to do. Alex Rodríguez cuts briskly enough that the 97 minutes do not feel like more, which is a mercy, and Robert Folk’s score works hard at telling us when to laugh. We cannot recall a bar of it.
Campbell and Green have done this before. She was Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and the reunion is the most interesting fact about the film, which the film itself does not seem to have noticed. Campbell can still stage a scene so you know where everyone is standing; he cannot do anything about a script in which nobody standing there is worth watching.
Anyone with an affection for the crime comedies of the late nineties, the ones with a name star above the title and not much beneath it, may find this a comfortable enough evening in. Everyone else should note that it is 97 minutes long, that Jackson is in most of them, and that this is as good as the news gets.
