Sorted
UK 2000
Reviewed by Dave Haslam
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
London, the present. Carl arrives from Scunthorpe following the death of his brother Justin, a wealthy lawyer. In Justin's flat Carl meets Sunny, Justin's girlfriend, and finds a note from HM Customs detailing a parcel available for collection. Carl and Sunny go to a club where Martin is the DJ. Carl also meets Tiffany and club owner Damian, one of Justin's clients. Next day he goes to Customs; Martin, who works as a customs officer, tells him Jake, a chemist and drug dealer, has already picked up the parcel, with the prior agreement of Justin.
Sunny tells Carl about her dream of travelling to Papua New Guinea and he arranges to meet her in a club. There Sunny is spotted by Damian and whisked away. Carl takes a dodgy pill and collapses. Sunny is threatened by Damian who is searching for a disk Justin had. Tiffany seduces Carl. Carl wakes to find Tiffany with Justin's disk, which he retrieves. The disk details Damian's involvement in the drugs trade. When Carl attempts to e-mail the information to the police he is interrupted by one of Damian's henchmen. Sunny and Carl are abducted, taken to a boat on the Thames and given pills by Damian designed to kill them. Jake, though, has prepared a less than fatal dose and a recovered Carl battles with Damian who falls into the water. Carl promises to accompany Sunny to Papua New Guinea.
Review
Debut director Alex Jovy's Sorted follows last year's moderately successful club movie Human Traffic. Sorted is more ambitious than Human Traffic, which followed a bunch of kids over the course of a weekend as they got off their heads and worried about their sex lives, but not necessarily the better for it. Telling of wide-eyed innocent Carl's gradual immersion into the rave scene, it's as much a rites-of-passage movie as a club film; and as Carl gets wind of his late brother Justin's involvement with club owner and drugs baron Damian, Jovy's script unfurls like a conventional thriller. (Carl comes to London following the discovery of a corpse, that age-old generic device.)
A former DJ, Jovy succeeds in capturing some of the vibrancy of club culture. The dance sequences are vivid, colourful and intense affairs in contrast with the somewhat dreary portrait of everyday life. There's also a clever use of computer-generated imagery during the film's scenes of drug-taking: after Carl drops a pill at his brother's wake, two puppies in a nearby painting snap into life; later the metallic steel of his BMW liquefies into silvery mercury. (A nice touch is the clubber, presumably on ecstasy, outside in the background, dancing to the green-neon flicker of a pub sign - although this throwaway gag is suspiciously reminiscent of Viz comic's 'Ravey Davey' character.)
Jovy's big mistake, though, is to overplay the naivety of Carl. When we first see him, straight off the train from Scunthorpe, he's wearing a suit. On accidentally switching on a pounding techno track on his brother's car radio, he winces. Later, he gets insulted by doormen, amazed at the price of drinks in London, and gobsmacked by the hedonism of the rave parties. This fish-out-of-water comedy can be amusing ("Are you sorted?" a pusher asks him in a club; "Am I who?" he replies) but the premise - that Carl should know nothing about club culture because he's from a terraced house in Scunthorpe - is an irritating piece of metropolitan sophistry. Damian is another serious flaw in the film. Virtually a pantomime figure, he's a devilish, cackling ham whose line in cod Shakespearean dialogue ("We meet again my sorrowful friend" he says to Carl, then acknowledges Justin's girlfriend Sonny by asking "and who is this maiden fair?") throws the film into the realm of fantasy.
The subject of a recent Channel 4 documentary, Jovy, then about to start shooting Sorted, was probably being disingenuous when he claimed to be ignorant about the technical basics of film-making: Sorted is glossy, polished, well put-together. The trouble is that his plot is routine in the extreme and his characters are either blandly conventional or ridiculously over-the-top. That Martin, the drug-fiend customs supervisor and part-time transvestite DJ with a heart of gold, is the best thing about the film probably says more about Sorted's failings than it does about Jason Donovan's spirited performance.
Credits
- Director
- Alex Jovy
- Producers
- Fabrizio Chiesa
- Mark Crowdy
- Screenplay
- Nick Villiers
- Story
- Alex Jovy
- Based on a screenplay by Christian Spurrier
- Malcolm Campbell
- Director of Photography
- Mike Southon
- Editor
- Justin Krish
- Production Designer
- Eve Stewart
- Music
- Guy Farley
- ©Jovy Junior Enterprises Ltd
- Production Company
- A Jovy Junior production
- Executive Producers
- Steve Clarke-Hall
- Alex Jovy
- Line Producer
- Peter La Terriere
- Production Co-ordinator
- Aislinn Whyte
- Production Manager
- Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor
- Location Manager
- Matt Steinmann
- Post-production
- Producer:
- Torsten Leschly
- Supervisors:
- Mark Harris
- Jackie Vance
- Co-ordinator:
- Katura Jensen
- Manager:
- Katja Leschly
- Assistant Directors
- Max Keene
- Matt Baker
- Dez Gray
- Danny McGrath
- Script Supervisor
- Victoria Pike
- Casting Director
- Gary Davy
- Crowd ADR Casting
- Louis Elman
- Camera Operator
- Ian Jackson
- Steadicam Operators
- Ian Jackson
- Additional:
- Roger Tooley
- Paul Edwards
- Vince McGahon
- Special Effects
- Effects Associates
- Associate Editor
- Liz Green
- Art Director
- Tom Read
- Costume Designer
- Ffion Elinor
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Shan James
- Hair/Make-up Designer
- Christine Blundell
- Main Title Design
- Creative Partnership
- Anders Bundgaard
- Orchestrator/Conductor
- Andrew Richard Pearce
- Executive Music Producer
- Bob Last
- Music Producer
- Guy Farley
- Programmer/Co-producer
- Marcus Brown
- Music Editor
- Kenny Clark
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Steve Price
- Soundtrack
- "Blindfold"- Morcheeba; "Rhino's Prayer" - Leftfield; "Don't Be Cruel" - Elvis Presley; "Fight the Power" - Public Enemy; "Gamemaster" - Lost Tribe; "El Nino" - Agnelli & Nelson; "Liberation" - Matt Darey; "Twisted Horns" - Twisted Pair; "Happy Together" - The Turtles; "Oh Sheila" - Southsugar; "Get Get Down" - Paul Johnston; "Lizard"; "Everyday" - Agnelli & Nelson; "Spice (even spicier)" - Aphrodite; "4.35 in the Morning" - St. Etienne; "K Sera" - Funky G, featuring the Gibson Bros; "2001" - Disposable Disco Dubs; "Chab Rassi" - Kadda Cherif Hadria; "Meet Her at the Love Parade" - Da Hool; "Mere Kabu" - DJ Chebi I Sabbah; "Pitchin'" - Hi Gate; "Lefturno" - Scott 4; "Swords" - Leftfield; "Release the Pressure" - Leftfield; "Useless (The Kruder & Dorfmeister session)" - Depeche Mode; "I Feel Love" - CRW; "See You in the Next Life" - Atlantis; "Madagascar" - Art of Trance
- Sound Recording
- Ian Voigt
- Re-recording Mixer
- Søren Bjerregaard-Ryan
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Bjørn Schroeder
- Dialogue Editor
- Howard Halsall
- ADR
- Mixers:
- Andy Thompson
- Peter Gleaves
- Editor:
- Ross Adams
- Foley
- Artist:
- Jan Lindvik
- Recordist:
- Svenn Jakobsen
- Mixer:
- Morten Holm
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Ray De-Haan
- Additional Co-ordinator
- Tom Lucy
- Animals Provided by
- Animal Dramatics
- Cast
- Matthew Rhys
- Carl
- Sienna Guillory
- Sunny
- Fay Masterson
- Tiffany
- Jason Donovan
- Martin
- Tim Curry
- Damian Kemp
- Ben Moor
- Thames Barrier officer
- Claire Harman
- Thames Barrier girl
- Mark Crowdy
- gallery manager
- Joseph Kpobie
- record shop rapper
- Neil Maskell
- record shop geezer
- Stephen Marcus
- Rob
- Michael Price
- Samson
- Bob Mercer
- bartender
- Simon Meacock
- silver shirt
- Kelly Brook
- Sarah
- Charlotte Bicknell
- Nicole
- Idris Elba
- Jam
- Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor
- Justin's PA
- Karl Mitchell
- traffic warden
- Gina Murray
- Jo
- Sebastian Knapp
- Jake
- Brian Bovell
- customs officer
- Martin Wimbush
- customs business man
- Jo Greary
- Matt Baker
- club punters
- Tim Vincent
- Justin
- Ben Waters
- Speedfreak
- Gerry Scanlon
- suit
- Clem Tibber
- school boy
- Mary Tamm
- school mother
- Alex Jovy
- club DJ
- Colin McFarlane
- Elton Farla
- Jo Manderson
- doctors
- Maureen Sweeney
- Annabel Ropner
- nurses
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Metrodome Distribution Ltd
- 9,212 feet
- 102 minutes 22 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour
- 2.35:1 [Super 35]