A thrilling modern-day take on Charles Dickens' novel, `Oliver Twist', as a gang of street hustlers plan the heist of the century.
Modern-day retellings are a dime a dozen. Like sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, it's difficult to get greenlit with an original film idea, when the audience is largely unwilling to invest in something that they don't already know about. It's how Game of Thrones continues to get spin-offs despite a widely panned final season, and how Disney made a killing reanimating the classic Lion King film without changing any aspect of the plot or dialogue. Having experienced Twist, it's apparent that the film was greenlit on the "connection" to Oliver Twist alone.
Twist gets off to a reasonable start with some adequately fast-paced parkour and some snazzy camera tricks that make the visual experience feel fresh and modern until you remember that this is effectively how 2014's The Kingsman started. As the use of parkour (or "free-running" as the characters continually remind us) is consistently applied throughout the film with the same camera tricks being applied over and over again, it starts to pale in comparison to better rooftop-parkour films such 2004's District 13 franchise, and suddenly Twist doesn't feel fresh and trendy; it feels like an outdated and unfashionable, one-trick pony.
An unfortunate deterioration of the first impression, the cast represents another swing and miss from the production crew. Expectations are high when you get big names like Michael Caine, Lena Headey, Rita Ora, and David Walliams involved, yet they all struggle in their own ways. With so little to work with from the script, Michael Caine's Fagin lacks any form of character development and runs on autopilot. His only conceivable acting prompt and direction seem to replicate his personality from Alfred in the Dark Knight trilogy.
Lena Headey is caught between two of her past roles, aiming somewhere between the grittiness of Dredd's Madeline "Ma-Ma" Madrigal and the cold, selfishness of Game of Thrones' Cersei Lannister, and landing on the petulant, adolescent personality of Star Wars' Kylo Ren; loud and irritating, but neither threatening nor intimidating. Rita Ora is so inconsequential to the film's plot that it requires effort to remember what scenes her character was in, let alone the character's purpose (outside of being a "woke" gender-bent Artful Dodger).
This is one of those films that fails because it wanted to be something else. They didn't want to be a Charles Dickens adaptation. They wanted to be part of the wave of Guy Ritchie-esque sporadic heist films without having the expertise to build likeable characters with understandable motives and big stakes.
The dialogue is ham-fisted and cliché, the action sequences are geographically muddled and poorly constructed with an uninspired indie tracklist that doesn't blend, the character relationships have no substance or implied history to them. Every piece of information and exposition is told through dialogue.
It is confounding how a film can have so many big names, retell a known popular story, and yet feel so empty and devoid of substance. It lacks the complexity to entertain the adult mind, and yet the content is too violent for the younger audiences. It attempts to be woke and edgy with gender-bending characters, but to be honest, watching 47-year-old Lena Headey forcefully make out with the 23-year-old Sophie Simnett (who is acting the role of a teenager) is more unsettling than liberating.
I don't know what they were thinking, but they clearly didn't put enough thought into it. This attempt to put a new twist on Oliver Twist has simply gone wrong. There is action, there is parkour, there are recognizable faces (along with the lead, Raff Law, a.k.a. Jude Law's son). These elements may not be linked in any sort of credible narrative thread, but they are still there. Watchable but not overly enjoyable, with each roof jump or camera flip eliciting a louder and louder groan of frustrated boredom.
Twist is in cinemas from April 29, 2021
Originally posted to: https://djin.nz/Kr8837