FILM
Comes A Bright Day
(15) 87mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Bellboy Sam Smith follows his heart - right into the middle of a languid hostage drama.
REVIEW
There's little disguising writer-director's advertising background in this fractured vignette.
Everything is elegant, languid, poetic and, in places, artificially stage-bound - perfect for a story of soft-held love, yearning and luxury.
Unfortunately, Simon Aboud allies these impeccable qualities (and performances) to a jewellery shop heist that is executed ineptly by both armed gang and director.
Comes A Bright Day is a hostage drama, with stuttering psycho Cameron, his bumbling sidekick Clegg (Cameron and Clegg, geddit?) holding at gunpoint wistful jeweller Charlie (Timothy Spall), earnest bellboy Sam Smith (Craig Roberts) and radiant shop assistant Mary (Imogen Poots).
Sam is smitten with Mary but crippled with nerves while Mary is a romantic in a brutal world. Charlie mourns the loss of his life's grand love.
The hostage plot is without tension, despite the bloodshed, and Kevin McKidd struggles to find consistency in Cameron - part Tarantino nutter, part A Fish Called Wanda's Ken Pile.
The film works best when Charlie, Mary and Sam pass the time in agreeable and unhurried fashion swapping tales of opulent romance.
But their fragile spell is too frequently undone by clumsy intrusions.
