Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but you have seen a movie before, haven’t you?
Country numbskulls in cliché chav garb Nathan (Ian Kenny) and Terry (Andrew Ellis) team up with their equally ridiculous pro small time criminal Gaz (Jake Curran) to rob the huge mansion of their town’s – one hopes retired – physician, Doctor Huggins (Sylvester McCoy). It isn’t exactly difficult finding a time when the Doctor (tee-hee) and his dementia-plagued wife Ellen (Rita Tushingham) aren’t home.
However, because these people are risible idiots, they accidentally drag Nathan’s girlfriend Mary (Maisie Williams) into the affair, or at least the mansion. Things don’t improve when the supposedly full safe Terry has been talking about turns out to be mechanical instead of the electronic kind Gaz would supposedly be able to crack (given the lack of criminal effectiveness on display, I’m sceptical). So, the idiots decide to turn the break-in into a home invasion, against Mary’s half-hearted protests, and get the safe’s code out of the doctor by force. Needless to say, they have problems realizing this goal; and because this is a horror film, the elderly gentleman and his wife are of course serial killers, among other things.
French director Julius Berg’s The Owners is a bit of a mess, mostly because the script by Berg, Mathieu Gompel and Geoff Cox can’t find another way to drive their narrative forward apart from making every single character outrageously stupid. Sure, for one of them, there will be a plot twist-y reason to not act effectively towards the criminal goal, but that just opens a different can of him being stupid in a different way, and really makes little sense when you, apparently unlike the writers, spend more than five minutes to think about the mechanics of his specific betrayal. And the film’s really not so exciting that a viewer won’t find any time pondering these things as a viewer.
The script also has its problems with effective characterisation. At first it introduces its protagonists (such as they are) as risible clichés of poor people who don’t seem to have a single trait that seems to connect them to human beings as you can encounter them outside of bad comedy. Then, pretty suddenly, the audience is expected to care for them as if they were actual well-rounded characters with recognizable character traits; in the next scene, everyone’s made out of cardboard again, and back and forth, and so on.
Tonally, the film tries its hardest to be some kind of black comedy horror thriller, something it actually succeeds at once it becomes a film about Mary versus the crazy elderly, and can fall back on mild grotesquery and classic suspense techniques, as well as a trio of actors in Williams, the delightful McCoy, and Tushingham, who do their very best to elevate the material to something that’s actually fun and entertaining to watch, even when it is lacking in depth.
Really, it’s one third of a good – in the sense of “entertaining” – movie, grafted onto two thirds of outright nonsense.
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