Setup review (Blu-ray) ★

Setup is a poor man's mash-up of The Town, Lucky Number Slevin and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead – with some shameless riffing on the work of Quentin Tarantino. And two of those films are themselves ripoffs of Mr QT!  It is no surprise this low-rent wannabe went straight to home viewing.

Cent, Phillippe and and Granstaff (who he?) are three long-term buddies from Detroit, on the wrong side of the tracks, but basically good guys, or so we are led to believe in Phillippe's case. He is the fixer of the group, who probably blames his problems on his old man, Remar, doing time in prison and in some very serious trouble with the wrong people. The gang has been recruited to rob an Iranian diamond courier mid-transit, which they do in a messy, mid-street semi-automatic shoot out (our first obvious The Town rip-off).

When Phillippe later leaves his buddies for dead and takes the haul, 50-Cent vows revenge. Slowly. Ridiculously, he doesn't seem to go to ground, he still drives around in the same car, hangs with the same crew. He also has the most banal interludes with a preacher and a waitress, I suppose in an attempt to make him more sympathetic. The waitress, a wannabe music star, chirrips: "You'll get what you want too." I honestly thought she was going to turn up again later, this was the one time this film surprised me when she didn't. Utterly pointless.

Cent is completely wooden here as the main "hero". Phillippe proves what an average presence he is in a film without the guiding hand of a skilled director, although even Clint Eastwood in Flags Of Our Fathers couldn't quite make lemonade from a lemon. Willis has no excuse for trading shamelessly on his Pulp Fiction quirkiness. As the unimaginatively named Mr Biggs, he wants Cent to retrieve some stolen money for him from some Russians. I have no idea why so many ethnic minorities from outside America are in this, other than an attempt to appear more sophisticated. Cent uses the money (after the most telegraphed accidental shooting that again rips off Pulp Fiction) to plant a seed of distrust between all the main players, leading to a Mexican stand off between the various bad guys (I don't need to tell you which film this copies. And it wasn't even original!)

Tonally, the film is all over the place. It wants to be  a gritty drama about friendship betrayed, hard choices made, and sacrifice, like The Town. Then it has Willis discussing at the breakfast table how he's annoyed that the simple pleasure of reading his sports pages in the paper over coffee will be taken away by the digital revolution. "Who wants to read the sports results on their cellphone?" Tarantino would blush. Occasionally various minor figures such as The Hitman, The Muscle and The Driver are introduced in a whooshing! comic-book type caption and character outline. This, and the playing off of various parties, reminded me of Slevin. The Hitman himself is probably a nod to Mr Shush, memorably played by Steve Buscemi in Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead.

Another character at one point says he isn't going to Wolf someone. This is a reference to Mr Wolf, Harvey Keitel's fixer in Pulp Fiction. By this point I was audibly groaning at the crowbarred in references and sly winks to better material. I suppose some fun could be had spotting these if there were better direction, story and performances on display. It is unimaginatively staged, apart from one shot from the victim's viewpoint within a glass tank as he is submerged by Mr Biggs' goons.

It is a pity there is no featurette with the main players trying to justify the mess on display here. Avoid.