Scarlett Monaghan (Charlotte Kirk), a supposedly tough, working class petty criminal, is busy one night pickpocketing drunks when she catches the eye of supposedly charismatic ex-marine, Robert McNaughton (Philip Winchester). While initially cautious, Scarlett enters a whirlwind romance with Robert, complete with a montage of them falling in love, which ends in gunfire. Rob reveals he is a diamond smuggler. “And I thought you peddled dope,” Scarlett says, shocked at the sight of a gorgeous, uncut 168 carat diamond. He did, once. If Rob can stay alive and in possession of the diamond long enough to sell it to Charlie (Stephanie Beacham), a wealthy crime lord, he’s in for his biggest payday yet.
But, much like the film’s protagonist, I’m getting ahead of myself. Directed by Neil Marshall (The Descent, The Reckoning) and co-written with Kirk, his fiancée, Duchess has the stylised storytelling of Guy Ritchie, complete with Scarlett’s nonchalant, cockney voiceover narration, and freeze frames with character names superimposed on screen. Opening on Scarlett luring a man into his own murder, which gets messy real quick, she interrupts to say that, in order to understand where this all started, we have to go back a bit. The first half of the film covers Scarlett meeting Rob and his team, Danny (Sean Pertwee) and Baraka (Hoji Fortuna), before he’s inevitably double crossed. The second half, then, is Scarlett’s journey on the road to revenge.
Duchess is all style over substance. Though the stylised editing is actually decent, it can’t help being derivative. As a crime revenge thriller, Marshall’s main focus is on the film’s action and violence, some of which is brutal. I’m talking tongue removal and burning dicks. Marshall is a competent action director, the scenes here varying in setting, giving the actors different objects to batter or torture one another with—but the directing quickly becomes repetitive, and the henchmen all seem to be impossibly bad shots. This cannot be the same man who directed incredible episodes of Black Sails, Game of Thrones, and Hannibal, but it is. For all the fast-paced action and violence, the film’s pacing feels painfully slow, almost tortuous. Just because it’s riffing on a Ritchie film doesn’t mean it has to be as long as one.
Kirk can definitely kick ass, but Scarlett is a dull, two-dimensional character. In fact, they all are. I never got lost in the story or invested in a single character; it always felt like I was watching a film. No one feels like a real person, and Kirk and Winchester have no chemistry, which was not helped by the bad dialogue, full of intense exposition and laughably bad lines, such as “Scarlett’s dead. My name’s Duchess.” The strong language and dark humour serve to break up the looming threat of tedium, but it often feels superfluous, style over substance once again. This is the first time I’ve seen Kirk in a lead role, so I could be wrong, but I’m inclined to believe that there’s a much stronger and more believable performance in her somewhere—one that perhaps cannot be pulled out by Marshall.
Duchess is a monotonous by-the-books crime thriller, with stupid and drawn out plot points, and unskilled storytelling lacking in precision. The setup for conflict often feels ingenuine and, just when a scene felt like it was finally getting interesting, it would change to something even more boring. Marshall and Kirk’s screenplay, which had additional dialogue from Simon Farr, feels like a group of teenagers sat down to bash out their own rendition of a 2000s British crime thriller, and then a good director was like, “Sure, why not?” The film’s closing moments tease a sequel that will hopefully never be made. There’s nothing wrong with making films with your partner, but something tells me their talent might be able to shine if they allowed their careers to part ways. Failing that, they could get a real script doctor to look over their ideas.
Duchess will be in Select UK cinemas from 9th August and on Digital Download on 12th August.
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