Shooting Fish
Directed by Stefan Schwartz
Distributed by Globe
Now screening in major cinemas
Review by Conrad Barnett
The Hollywood chase-and-misadventure film gets a '90s makeover, an English accent and a Brit pop soundtrack in the new film Shooting Fish. Unfortunately, it's still a Hollywood chase-and-misadventure film.
The film begins with a fair enough premise: two unemployed young guys fleece gullible rich people to earn a crust, an old and admirable vocation.
The wit and charm of Dylan (Dan Futterman), the smooth talking American, and the warped genius of the shy, unconventional technical whiz Jez (Stuart Townsend), combine to pull off "ingenious" feats of fraud.
A young woman named Georgie (Kate Bekinsale) is thrown into their world when she takes a job the two advertise in the newspaper. Georgie is unamused when she finds out what they are up too, but soon decides to help them out.
The plot then follows their crazy scams as they approach their target of $2 million. In the meantime, the romantic subplot takes an "unexpected" turn.
They eventually get careless and hit the same guy twice, and the trouble begins.
The redeeming feature of this film is that a fairly talented cast of actors manage to squeeze a few endearing traits into their characters, despite a script that does its best to stop them. Shooting Fish resurrects the old jock/nerd stereotype, and the female character is very weak.
One expects a certain degree of embellishment in a story line of this genre, but Shooting Fish goes overboard. The feats of "ingenious fraud" are more like a series of out-takes from a bad '80s collage movie. The rich people are impossibly gullible, and few of the scams are particularly clever.
There are also contradictions in the plot. For starters, the two young guys rip off the rich and only the rich. Yet this contempt for the rich is matched only by their own desire to be rich, so the point of the film is that the main characters become contemptible.
The film is not about youth culture or rebellion. In fact, at every stage it endorses the status quo. The characters are redeemed at the end by coming back into the fold of respectable, affluent society, and getting married.
Don't bother seeing it.