Friday 13 September 2013

"Borrowed Time" (The Guardian 13/09/13)


Borrowed Time (15) 86 mins **

London Film School graduate Jules Bishop’s debut rearranges the usual geezer plot mechanics into a makeshift urban fairytale, more Children’s Film Foundation than Kidulthood. Theo Barklem-Biggs is the tracksuited drip coerced into burglary to settle his debts; Phil Davis the property’s owner, possessed of an 18th century blunderbuss and various tatty life lessons – and really it’s only Davis’s unsentimental fleshing out of this whiskery, Steptoe-esque coot that saves the film from total familiarity. Boosted by colourful East End location work, it exudes a certain low-key, pootling charm, but often gets sloppy: who casts Perry Benson as a middle-class snob? 

Borrowed Time opens in selected cinemas from today.

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