Duchess Review: Action Crime Thriller Struggles To Find an Identity

Neil Marshall swaps out horror for crime thriller with his latest movie Duchess. But he struggles to make a standout example.

Marshall’s recent run of movies with Charlotte Kirk as star and writer have not exactly been the finest moments in the career of the Dog Soldier and The Descent filmmaker. Perhaps a change of genre could freshen things up and revitalize things and find a groove that truly works for the pair.

However, if that is the case, then a British gangster crime thriller is clearly not the place to go if Duchess is anything to go by. This latest film is a tonally incoherent mess that almost feels like a parody of low-rent cockney gangster flicks. Unfortunately, Duchess is quite serious about what it is.

Working-class petty criminal Scarlett (Charlotte Kirk) leads a fairly humdrum life that is sadly pockmarked by aggressive disdain from any of the men in her life. Her small life of crime gets elevated to the big leagues when she meets Robert (Philip Winchester). Robert is a diamond smuggler who takes a shine to Scarlett, and as their love grows, she gets deeper into the world Robert inhabits.

That leads to tragedy and betrayal. Scarlett is left for dead, and with the help of Robert’s longtime pals and partners Billy Baraka (Hoji Fortuna) and Danny Oswald (Sean Pertwee), she vows to get revenge on those behind the betrayal.

From minute one, Duchess feels like a pastiche of British gangster movies from the likes of Guy Ritchie, Nick Love, and Craig Fairbrass’ Rise of the Footsoldier series. The instant comparison is Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Jaunty, foul-mouthed, and violent crime capers featuring established British actors swearing to the extreme while doling out typical gangster threats.

Duchess has Kirk’s Scarlett narrate the story (quite unnecessarily a lot of the time unless you have the attention span of a battered sausage) and introduce each character with bullet point summaries of their personalities (seemingly in place of actually giving them personalities in some cases).

Dialogue, with the exception of a few genuinely amusing lines, is full of every typical British gangster movie quip you can think of, and some ”fresh” ones that curl the toes with how clunky and overbearing they are.

The opening hour tries to play things off as a frothy, vibrant crime caper, with Kirk going heavy on the East End dialogue. It’s easily Kirk’s best showing under Marshall’s direction, but that was an admittedly low bar after the likes of The Reckoning. It’s not necessarily a good performance, but it leans so far into unintentional parody that it makes it actually funny in moments.

But then the movie makes a mid-point shift in tone. I could see how moving from a cheery, violent, sweary caper to a bloody revenge thriller could be a really interesting change. But there has to be a certain nuance to such a transition, and the jolt from one tone to the other is uncomfortably hard. What follows is a film that often struggles to hold down a coherent vision.

The action suffers similarly. A fun, violent slapstick brawl aside, the set pieces are painfully wonky and are labored in their pacing. There are glimmers of what Marshall can do well in some grisly scenes, but they are sadly fleeting and usually followed by something underwhelming.

The choice of music and visual style for Duchess clearly intends to ape Ritchie’s early gangster hits, but all it does is make Duchess look like a strange extended tie-in advert for some dodgy overseas gambling company. The music and visual flourishes play just as big a part in the tonal issues as the dialogue and performances.

While Duchess isn’t exactly terrible, it feels a world away from what this director has shown he can do, and that makes it all the more disappointing. It rarely manages to rise above tolerable, and a nearly two-hour runtime does it no favors. In an oversaturated sub-genre of British gangster films, Duchess criminally doesn’t do much to stand out.