Reviewed by Sam Unsted
Stars Mackenzie Crook, Colm Meaney, Imelda Staunton, Gemma Arterton,
Mark Benton, Kerry Katona (!), Gary Lewis, Frank Dunne | Written by: Steve Lewis & Tony Owen
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 106 minutes | Directed by Jonathan Gershfield
Widely reviled on release, Three and Out is the sort of British film that makes you wish that they’d make more Guy Ritchie ripoffs like Rancid Aluminium. More positively, it really makes you wish all film councils and producers in the land would a) give all their money to Shane Meadows to keep making films, and b) prevent anyone giving Mackenzie Crook any leading roles. Ever.
Three and Out bases its premise on the urban myth that if a driver of a London tube train hits and kills three people in a month, the city will pay them off with 10 years' salary in a lump sum and grant early retirement. Our "hero", Crook’s Paul, decides that getting this pay-off will give him the time and space he needs to write his novel. So, he goes in search of someone already close to death or about to commit suicide and offers them £1500 to spend over the weekend before they have to jump in front of his train. He eventually finds semi-vagrant Meaney and makes the deal. But Meaney has some unfinished business with his family (estranged wife Staunton and daughter Arterton) and so they embark on a journey together and some other stuff happens and then it ends and you jump for joy that you no longer have to watch this embarrassingly woeful slab of poo.
Crook is increasingly denigrating his legacy as Gareth in The Office. First Sex Lives of the Potato Men and now this — a misguided and misfiring attempt at black comedy that neither Crook or the writer have the balls for. Dark comedy has to be written so that you are not being forced into liking the anti-hero. The writers and Crook seem to have a desire to make that you feel sorry for and sympathise with a main character who wants someone to jump in front of his train so he can write a book. It’s not funny, it’s not clever and all involved should be thoroughly ashamed.
I don’t want to pile into Crook too much more because, in all fairness, it’s really the writer’s fault. Any attempts at comedy are hamfisted and dumb. Any attempts at darkness are tinged with a lack of commitment to go all the way into truly mean territory, meaning that any moments that should feel dark just seem pathetic and make you dislike the main character all the more. Meaney, Staunton and Arterton do fine but have nothing to work with. Arterton, one of the new generation of Bond girls, even has to suffer the truly humiliating experience of having a very poorly filmed sex scene with Crook. For that, perhaps she should win at least some sort of humanitarian prize, or maybe an award for bravery at the minimum. Meaney and Staunton somehow manage to earn the single star you see above by managing to act bloody hard and eke some sort of emotion out of the clunky, secondary school-play dialogue that occurs between them.
I can’t tell you to avoid this enough. There is really no way I can envisage a situation where you could watch and enjoy this depressing example of how not to make a dark comedy.
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