![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday evening I was in Ashford to do a visit at Cineworld. The film I chose was the gritty British remake of Pusher. Originally, it was a Danish made film.
Frank (Richard Coyle),the Pusher of the title, is only slightly less dislikeable than most of the other characters, now has less than 48 hours to put together £55,000 or be kneecapped by the sadistic, smiling Serbian drug lord Milo (played by the same frightening actor, Zlatko Buric, as in the Danish original).
The plot has now been transposed to south London and directed by a US-educated Spanish film-maker, Luis Prieto.
It's well enough made, but the plot is overly familiar. It reminds me of Ken Hughes's “The Small World of Sammy Lee” starring Anthony Newley as a small-time crook, who has 24 hours to pay off a gambling debt and rushes around Soho and the East End with heavies in hot pursuit. Newley even resorts to tapping his honest shopkeeper brother (Warren Mitchell) in the same way that Frank, his opposite number in the Pusher remake, takes his old mother's meagre savings. The big difference, however, is that the new film is infinitely more violent and the tsunami of obscenities far beyond anything the most libertarian viewer could have anticipated in 1963.
Still, a gritty quite powerful piece of film drama.
Frank (Richard Coyle),the Pusher of the title, is only slightly less dislikeable than most of the other characters, now has less than 48 hours to put together £55,000 or be kneecapped by the sadistic, smiling Serbian drug lord Milo (played by the same frightening actor, Zlatko Buric, as in the Danish original).
The plot has now been transposed to south London and directed by a US-educated Spanish film-maker, Luis Prieto.
It's well enough made, but the plot is overly familiar. It reminds me of Ken Hughes's “The Small World of Sammy Lee” starring Anthony Newley as a small-time crook, who has 24 hours to pay off a gambling debt and rushes around Soho and the East End with heavies in hot pursuit. Newley even resorts to tapping his honest shopkeeper brother (Warren Mitchell) in the same way that Frank, his opposite number in the Pusher remake, takes his old mother's meagre savings. The big difference, however, is that the new film is infinitely more violent and the tsunami of obscenities far beyond anything the most libertarian viewer could have anticipated in 1963.
Still, a gritty quite powerful piece of film drama.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}