Title: Blue Iguana
Director: Hadi Hajaig
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Ben Schwartz, Phoebe Fox, Peter Ferdinando, Peter Polycarpou
Released: Out Now.
Length: 97 mins
Cert: 15
If you were offered a low-key heist, no strings attached, that would break you out of your monotonous 9-5 in a diner, would you take it?
Out of jail and on parole, Eddie (Sam Rockwell) and Paul (Ben Schwartz), are working dead-end jobs in a diner in New York. Enter geeky English lawyer Katherine Rookwood (Phoebe Fox) who presents the pair with the offer of a lifetime. She wants them to steal the Blue Iguana - a very valuable diamond.
But first they need to steal £800,000 of bearer bonds in order to repay shady crime boss Arkary (Peter Polycarpou). And then they’ll have to get past Arkary’s gang of trashy scumbag villains - led by Deacon Bradshaw (Peter Ferdinando) if they are to get the jewel. When it comes to the point where Katherine can be free of her commitments to the crime boss Arkady will she take her chance to be free or will she help Eddie and Paul?
Rockwell and Fox are the stars of this film and (even if looking washed-up and washed-out) their star quality shows through, even if Rockwell is far too good for this material. The supporting cast, especially the English gangsters are one dimensional and fair less well, if I’d have been directing I’d have cut most of their interactions with each other and cut the film run time by 20 minutes, tightening up the story and more or less removing these loathsome characters.
Despite Eddie repeatedly stating that as soon as the job is done he’ll be returning to America it’s blinding obvious, from as little as five minutes into the film (because if a man is sexually excited by a woman eating a hotdog then naturally she will also be attracted to him (just another example of everyday casual misogyny in film that needs to be removed from our culture), that he will end up romantically involved with Katherine - a disastrous mismatch if ever there was one.
The hand-to-hand, often bone-crunching, violence and profanity is needlessly over the top and the storyline and plotting are often verging on shambolic (and as mentioned tremendously obvious) so it’s a surprise that this film holds together until the end - but it does. That said Blue Iguana is a darkly-comic heist thriller with a acerbic witty edge that will please audiences with a darker sense of humour.
