Duchess
Directed by Neil Marshall
Written by Neil Marshall and Charlotte Kirk
Starring Charlotte Kirk, Philip Winchester, Colm Meaney and Hoji Fortuna
Runtime 113 minutes
In theaters and on-demand August 12

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Whatever happens, he made The Descent. Neil Marshall has directed post-apocalyptic action films, swords and sandals epics, lynchpin episodes of Game of Thrones and Hannibal, a Hellboy movie that was all over the place but contained a few very good creepy sequences peaking out through the mess. But again, he made The Descent, the most effective horror film of its decade. If you write and direct what was then a great horror film and is now, in retrospect, even more impressive for how unable anybody else has been at capturing that movie's tension and claustrophobia, I will be listening. Marshall's filmography since The Descent has been unpredictable, but that Hannibal episode, which introduced the Francis Dolarhyde character to the show and helped ground a series that was getting a little too abstract, was not that long ago. He's gone in many directions, none as strong as The Descent or his first film, Dog Soldiers, but they've all at least been a little interesting.

If that lede felt long, know that it was a form of procrastination. I didn't want to write the sentence "Neil Marshall has made an unthinkably bland charm-desert of a movie." But he has and it bums me out a bit and I wrote the sentence.

Duchess is the third movie he's made starring and co-written by Charlotte Kirk, his creative partner and wife. The first two, The Reckoning and The Lair, were horror films that, while not good, communicated an interest in seeing what Marshall and Kirk could accomplish while remaining under the horror umbrella. They have another film in post-production, which Marshall has said takes influence from giallo. Between horror movies, Marshall and Kirk made this, a British crime thriller, and if the genre shift sounds ambitious, if Marshall's old mastery of tension getting grafted onto a story about an underground diamond exchange seems full of opportunity and you, like me, think "Wow, what a good fit," I'm sorry.

I'm sorry because this is the type of movie Marshall and Kirk have made: After the opening scene makes a sudden jump from sex to violence, Kirk's character, Duchess, literally narrates the line "Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself-- to really understand where this all began, you have to go back a bit."

And I'm sorry because the whole movie is full of those cliches. A few minutes after the flashback, Duchess is picking pockets in a bar and meets Rob (Phillip; Winchester), the action freezes, Rob's name jumps on screen and Duchess says "That's Rob McNaughton, the future love of my life. Ex-marine, ex-con, excellent in bed, as it turns out and, oh yeah, extremely fucking dangerous." Rob's got a whole crew and they're all dangerous. They've met each other in foreign jails and mercenary jobs and they say "fuck" a lot.

Does that do anything for you? A British woman and an American man saying "fuck" at each other? Is it surprising when an old British lady swears? Would seeing her stab a person in the neck strike you as so novel you wouldn't find its immediate repetition boring? Can you pull true insight from dialogue as trite as "You can't choose where you're coming from, but you can choose where you're going?" Do you like people firing guns at each other, even if the action's shot in such a way that you can't tell where anybody is in relation to anybody else and each actor, for how well the scenes are staged, might as well have been filmed in separate decades Are your old True Romance and Snatch DVDs scratched?

Marshall has made a Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn movie, which is to say he's taking their recycled 70s and 80s crime tropes and recycling them again. When Ritchie and Vaughn are on, when they're making movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, they're able to use those tropes, slap a bunch of geezer vernacular on everything and throw in enough music video-style flourishes that you don't mind the regurgitation because everything's moving so quickly and it's all so fun. You don't mind that you aren't watching something as strong as The Long Good Friday or Get Carter because four wandering gangs just descended on a tiny London flat and blew it apart to the Zorba the Greek theme.

Duchess isn't original, but it also isn't fun. There are long, slow passages where nothing's stopping you from checking if Mona Lisa is streaming anywhere.

The plot is typical British crime stuff: Duchess gets into the illegal diamond trade despite knowing how dangerous it is, and then things get dangerous. She knows she can't trust certain people and then finds out she can't trust them. New characters are still getting the "freeze frame, their name splashes across the screen and Duchess gives a little quip about how much they like to swear or whatever" treatment 70 minutes into the movie, but it doesn't matter because they're all the same person.

The only unique thing on display is Marshall's rare version of the male gaze. His camera ogles Kirk's character, but she's his partner, so it feels like the guy next to you is constantly leaning over and stage whispering "Look at my wife's butt. Look at it." And I'm sorry for that, too.

I'm not sorry because I have anything to do with the movie. I obviously do not. There's just something about Marshall's early hits that seemed to ensure he'd keep making good art. Maybe the apologetic feeling is coming from that Tyra Banks rant place: "We were rooting for you." Maybe I hate being the nth person to say that Marshall may not be coming back, that his failures aren't even interesting anymore, that the little good bits in a movie like Hellboy don't pop up in the new work.

A broad outline of the stages of disappointment might overlay neatly with Neil Marshall's career: "This guy's good" to "This guy's great!" to "This guy isn't what I expected, but he's okay" to "This guy's mediocre, but I'm willing to hang in there as long as there are sparks of the work I initially got so excited about" to "Is the original guy ever coming back?" After Duchess, I don't know that I'll discover any further stages.