Dan­ger­ous Game

Low-bud­get British crime movies often get a severe lash­ing from film crit­ics and right­ful­ly so. They are most­ly derivate, unin­ven­tive, bad­ly act­ed, poor­ly writ­ten and hor­ri­bly direct­ed. Dan­ger­ous Game is guilty of all of those things, but some­where with­in its bewil­der­ing make-up is a meta work which applies dream log­ic to a reject­ed plot from Foot­ballers’ Wives, while star­ing con­tes­tants from Celebri­ty Big Broth­er. It is both ter­ri­ble and utter­ly fascinating.

Calum Best, son of foot­balling leg­end George Best, plays Chris Rose, a hot­shot strik­er who earns a big-mon­ey move to his child­hood club, East Strat­ford. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Chris, his hope­less life­long friend Adam (Amar Ada­tia) has racked up some con­sid­er­able debts with the Russ­ian mafia and needs some help. Sub­se­quent­ly, the Rus­sians begin exploit­ing the sit­u­a­tion and demand that Chris fix­es a few match­es as a means of resolv­ing the prob­lem. Pre­dictably, that doesn’t go to plan and Chris and Adam resort to more extreme meth­ods to appease their oppressors.

The ludi­crous nature of the plot is, frankly, too grand for the film to pos­si­bly live up to. Far too often it relies upon cheap and whim­si­cal com­e­dy to dig itself out of a hole. Hav­ing said there are a hand­ful of moments with­in Dan­ger­ous Game that are, quite pos­si­bly, an unknow­ing work of genius. The open­ing mon­tage which document’s Chris’ life and career plays out like an intense fever dream that is too per­fect to be real but still far­fetched enough to exceed expectations.

Lines of dia­logue actu­al­ly ques­tion whether cer­tain scenes are tru­ly hap­pen­ing, as if iron­i­cal­ly com­ment­ing on the ludi­crous nature of the movie. Fur­ther scenes such as two glam­our mod­els (Lucy Pin­der and Malia Arkian) sleep­ing with an unem­ployed man with foot­ball bed sheets and the appear­ance of Dar­ren Day as Rus­sia mafia boss are too strange to be labelled bad.

There is a per­verse sense of mag­ic at hand in Dan­ger­ous Game. It serves as both a com­ment on the cheap­ness of British B‑movies, the medi­oc­rity of foot­ballers lifestyles and the careers that celebri­ties can har­ness through var­i­ous appear­ances on real­i­ty tele­vi­sion. There is no escap­ing the shod­di­ness of its pro­duc­tion – but then who wouldn’t want to see a film in which Katie Price’s ex-hus­band, Alex Reid, plays the chair­man of a Pre­mier League club…