This film is the utterly mirthless equivalent of someone who takes you out to dinner, buys a terrible meal, keeps cracking rubbish jokes and then pokes you in the ribs every 10 minutes as they repeatedly ask (without listening for an answer): “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this fun?” No, it is not fun. Not even in a so-bad-it’s-good way.
A roster of talent that has either seen more glorious days – director Renny Harlin, stars Pierce Brosnan, Nick Cannon and Tim Roth – or are about to have their careers mildly blighted by association – younger cast members Jamie Chung, Hermione Corfield, Mike Angelo and Rami Jabar – are assembled for a half-baked heist plot set in, as someone describes sneeringly, “some country called Jazeristan”. In an excruciating feat of cognitive dissonance, bad faith and ill manners, the film manages to depict the Arab world as one mostly populated by rich funders of terror and bumbling suckers, while using eye-candy locations in Abu Dhabi and Dubai to add a veneer of glamour.
The steal is being organised by a posse calling themselves the Misfits (even the handle seems maladroit because they all seem like normal, boring, equally implausible movie characters) who steal from the rich to help the oppressed. Their leader is the film’s on-off narrator Ringo (Cannon), and his crew, made up of man-hating female assassin Violet (Chung), explosives expert Wick (Angelo) and a token nice Middle Eastern chap known only as the Prince (Jabar) team up with master con-artist Pace (Brosnan) and his idealistic daughter Hope (Corfield) to break into a Jazeristani prison run by English baddie Schultz (Roth) to steal a bunch of gold. Much half-hearted banter and many montages ensue.
In the end, this has all the joie de vivre of an airport in the middle of the night after all the tax-free shops and restaurants have closed. And waiting for it to finish is like sitting bored on a hard plastic chair and then realising your phone has run out of battery but the charger is packed in a suitcase you already checked in. Really awful.
• The Misfits is released on 29 August on digital platforms.
