Circus
USA/UK 2000
Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Brighton, the present. Gangster boss Bruno Maitland orders the killing of his double-crossing accountant. Bruno hopes to recruit con artist Leo Garfield to run his casino. Leo is reluctant to take the job. He and his wife Lily are planning their own scam: Leo has been hired to murder Gloria by her husband, businessman Julius Harvey. But Harvey has double-crossed Leo: Gloria isn't his wife after all. He begins to blackmail Leo, who is already in trouble with psychopathic local bookie Troy.
It turns out that Gloria was the girlfriend of Bruno's bodyguard Moose. Distraught at her disappearance, he chases Leo into a Brighton hotel and is about to kill him when he realises Gloria is still alive. Leo staged the killing to hoodwink Harvey. Meanwhile, Lily's ex-boyfriend, Elmo Somerset, has come to Brighton to kill her. (Years before, she abandoned him mid-heist.) It turns out that Harvey is Bruno's new accountant and they are plotting against Leo together.
Everybody seems to be double-crossing one another. Leo and Harvey appear to be working in cahoots to swindle Bruno. They've managed to embezzle millions from him. There's a final shoot-out during which Leo and Harvey kill Bruno and Lily. They escape. Leo drugs Harvey and abandons him. Leo goes to the station to leave town. Waiting for him there is Lily. Her death turns out to have been faked.
Review
"Don't trust any of these clowns," reads the tagline for Circus, an enjoyably awful Brighton-set crime movie which touts itself as a British answer to The Usual Suspects. It's a warning worth heeding. From the very first scene in which a criminal boss (rather improbably played by comedian Brian Conley) chews off a victim's ear, the film teeters on the edge of self-parody. The presence of Conley's fellow comedian Eddie Izzard (a loveable psychotic who enjoys going skinny dipping near Brighton Pier) reinforces the sense that we're not watching a proper gangster movie at all - rather one of those Comic Strip Presents spoofs which Peter Richardson, Keith Allen et al used to make in the 80s.
The film-makers blithely invoke every gangster movie cliché available. Conley may dress for much of the movie like Nehru, but he performs as if he is parodying Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday. The setting rekindles memories of the seedy Brighton written about by Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene. There are plenty of nods in the direction of film noir, a few bows in the direction of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and even one or two murkily lit Cincinnati Kid-style gambling sequences.
One character, Conley's gigantic but simple-minded minder Moose, seems to have been taken directly from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. Lily, the double-crossing femme fatale, is presumably intended as a counterpart to the equally hard-boiled dames played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lauren Bacall, but she's lumbered with some woeful dialogue. ("I love you, you slinky, short-arsed Scotsman," is not a line Bacall would ever have uttered.) Circus is full of such bizarre juxtapositions. Fred Ward, as craggy and imposing as character actors come, is well cast as an American hoodlum, but is then lumbered with the sort of saucy scenes you used to find in Dick Emery or Benny Hill sketches. And Peter Stormare's gawky, vaguely sinister accountant is even more mannered than his John Lennon-soundalike in The Million Dollar Hotel.
Howard Hawks famously observed that he never really understood the labyrinthine plot of The Big Sleep. He would have been totally baffled by Circus. David Logan's screenplay is so full of twists and reversals that the film-makers themselves seem bewildered by it. Certain characters, for instance Izzard's bookie or Amanda Donohoe's vamp, simply vanish. It is not clear how somebody as resourceful and cunning as Leo ever managed to get into hock to a low-life like Izzard's Troy Cabrera in the first place, nor how certain characters die in one scene and are miraculously resurrected in the next. The plotting is more tricksy than ingenious. The facile humour (pitbulls running themselves to a standstill on exercise machines and the like) undercuts any air of menace or tension. Still, the Simon Boswell soundtrack lends at least the illusion of urgency to the storytelling and the entire project is eccentric enough to qualify for cult status.
Credits
- Director
- Rob Walker
- Producers
- James Gibb
- Alan Latham
- Screenplay
- David Logan
- Director of Photography
- Ben Seresin
- Editor
- Oral Norrie Ottey
- Production Designer
- James Merifield
- Music
- Simon Boswell
- ©Columbia Pictures Industries Inc
- Production Companies
- Columbia Pictures presents a Film Development Corporation production
- Executive Producer
- Alberto Ardissone
- Production Supervisor
- Ron Purdie
- Production Co-ordinator
- Diane Chittell
- Unit Manager
- Simon Crook
- Location Manager
- Casper Mill
- Post-production Supervisors
- Jay Coquillon
- Steve Harrow
- Assistant Directors
- Richard Hewitt
- Toby Sherborne
- Matthew Penry-Davey
- Andrea Slater
- Script Supervisors
- Sarah Garner
- Layla Lee-Curtis
- Casting
- Michelle Guish
- Camera Operator
- Peter Cavaciuti
- Special Effects
- Tom Harris
- Paul Kelly
- Art Director
- Peter Wenham
- Set Decorator
- Gina Cromwell
- Scenic Artists
- Dereck Cowie
- Alister Plant
- Paddy Hamilton
- Magnus Irvine
- Helen Gillilan
- Costume Designer
- Anna Sheppard
- Chief Make-up/Hair
- Pam Haddock
- Make-up/Hair Artist
- Alison Davies
- Make-up
- Alison Bell
- Prosthetics
- John Cormican
- Title Sequence
- Richard Morrison
- Dena Johnson
- Main Title Design Effects
- The Moving Picture Company
- Opticals
- GSE
- Rhythm Programmer
- Gregg Wilson
- Music Supervisor
- Iain Jones
- Engineer
- Geoff Foster
- Soundtrack
- "12 Hole Shoes", "Breathless", "There Is a Way" by The Alex Heffes Trio; "Dirty Tricks" by Overdog; "Deep Depression" by Simon Boswell; "That's Life" by Hinda Hicks; "You're the One That I Want"; "Big Spender"; "House of the Rising Sun"; "R.E.S.P.E.C.T."; "The Monkees"; "Another Bites the Dust"
- Sound Mixer
- Bill Dodkin
- Re-recording Mixers
- Aad Wirtz
- John Falcini
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Campbell Askew
- Dialogue Editors
- Ross Adams
- Andy Shelley
- Bill Trent
- ADR Editors
- Ross Adams
- Andy Shelley
- Bill Trent
- Foley
- Artists:
- Andie Derrick
- Paula Boram
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Editor:
- Bob Gavin
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Peter Brayham
- Animals Handlers
- Animals Okay
- Cast
- John Hannah
- Leo Garfield
- Famke Janssen
- Lily Garfield
- Peter Stormare
- Julius Harvey
- Brian Conley
- Bruno Maitland
- Tiny Lister
- George 'Moose' Marley
- Amanda Donohoe
- Gloria
- Fred Ward
- Elmo Somerset
- Eddie Izzard
- Troy Cabrera
- Ian Burfield
- Caspar Glit
- Neil Stuke
- Roscoe
- Michael Attwell
- Magnus
- Jason Watkins
- Dom
- Christopher Biggins
- Arnie
- Lucy Akhurst
- Helen
- Louise Rolfe
- Hinda Hicks
- Kelly
- Rob Walker
- old tramp
- Marcus Heath
- Paul
- Christopher Tune
- boy racer
- Louis Hammond
- jeweller
- Evelyn Duah
- jeweller's assistant
- Steve Toussaint
- black
- Julie Saunders
- hotel receptionist
- Che Walker
- nightclub worker
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Columbia Tristar Films (UK)
- 8,592 feet
- 95 minutes 28 seconds
- Dolby/SDDS
- Colour by
- DeLuxe