Bodywork review

Billed as a "darkly comic contemporary thriller", Bodywork is a strong candidate for the worst British film of the year, and as those who've endured the likes of Rancid Aluminium and Brothers know, that's saying something.

The preposterous storyline involves Virgil Guppy (Hans Matheson), an ordinary young man, who finds himself charged with the murder of a prostitute. Virgil goes on the run, pursued by various hitmen and incompetent coppers. But he's not alone for long: Guppy soon teams up with car thief Tiffany Shades (Charlotte Coleman), a dying single mum...

The first feature from writer-director Gareth Rhys Jones, the privately funded Bodywork simply doesn't merit a cinematic release: the characterisations are utterly uninteresting, the dialogue hackneyed, the tone uncertain and the performances lacking conviction. Why actors such as Coleman and Matheson were attracted to this sort of patently substandard material is a mystery.