I sat down to Fast Food with high hopes. It promised inspiration from new Asian cinema, and boasted Douglas Henshall as the lead – always a very attractive,
watchable performer even when, as here, he is let down by the script. Fast Food quickly degenerates into just another load of old pseudo-American gangster cliches: transparent, larcenous borrowings from GoodFellas and Reservoir Dogs. (Writer-director Stewart Sugg even uses a gag about Walker’s cheese and onion crisps coming in a blue packet that was invented long ago by Channel 4’s Adam and Joe.)
The lead characters are supposed to have grown up together in Woolwich in south-east London, yet their accents are Manc, Belfast, cockney, Glaswegian. The violence is ugly and unconvincing. And why do so many British film-makers want to do callow, show-off thrillers with guns, an idiom for which they clearly have no aptitude or knowledge whatever?