Producers: Emily Corcoran and Krystina Sellnerova   Director: Neil Marshall   Screenplay: Neil Marshall and Charlotte Kirk   Cast: Charlotte Kirk, Philip Winchester, Colin Egglesfield, Stephanie Beacham, Sean Pertwee, Hoji Fortuna, Colm Meaney, Mellissa Laycy, Yan Tual, Boris Martinez, David Chevers, Harvey Dean, Jota Ramos, Iván Hermés, Giada Falzoni and Judy Donovan   Distributor: Saban Films

Grade: D

Neil Marshall, who showed modest promise in his early days with movies like “The Descent” and “Centurion,” has of late devoted himself to making showcases for his partner Charlotte Kirk.  The result has been a string of disasters like 2021’s awful “The Reckoning.”  “Duchess,” a terrible gender-bending rip-off of the British gangster movies of Guy Ritchie, adds to the woeful list.

With a tendency to preen, pout and pose seductively to camouflage the inadequacy of what passes for her acting and to disrobe as often as possible to show off her well-developed physique, Kirk plays Scarlett, a pickpocket who bumps into smooth diamond smuggler Rob (Philip Winchester); the two quickly fall into one another’s arms.  But all does not go well, because except for Danny (Sean Pertwee) and Baraka (Hoji Fortuna), Rob’s longtime crew turns against him, with slick, smiling Tom (Colin Egglesfield) the chief traitor.  Tom kills Ron and leaves Scarlett for dead.

So she’s out for revenge, a mission that consumes the second half of the movie.  It concludes with s clever plot Scarlett, now using the nickname Duchess, concocts—allowing Tom to capture and torture her and her cohorts for a while until a band of SWAT-like allies she’s enlisted show up with automatic rifles to blow away their most of their captors, except for a few whom our heroes are allowed to kill themselves.  Duchess takes on Tom mano a mano, showing the buff results from the training in the boxing ring Marshall periodically pauses to show us.

Given the small army of characters—Marshall is kind enough to freeze frame most on their initial appearance and post their names in large letters (a practice he repeats at the start of the closing credits), but it really doesn’t help—there’s a good deal of confusion about who’s doing what to whom, and why.  Only the main figures register as anything but blurs, and even they don’t have much personality.  There are a couple of familiar faces, like Colm Meaney, who does what amounts to a cameo as Scarlett’s imprisoned father, and Pertwee, who will be recognized by anyone who watched the “Gotham” television series (he played Arthur Pennyworth); and a few others, like Stephanie Beacham as a British crime lord, make an impression through sheer flamboyance.  But for the most part the supporting cast are nondescript. 

One exception is Egglesfield.  Tom’s supposed to be a fearsome villain, but the actor’s high-pitched voice and stilted manner make him more embarrassing than menacing.  Another is a rather handsome tiger, unidentified by the captioning, that’s kept by somebody at the bottom of a pit.  The animal serves as a body disposal mechanism; when a foe has been killed, they’ll often toss the corpse into the pit to be devoured, although there’s no explanation about how the bones are removed.  When someone wants to be particularly nasty, he’ll toss a captured enemy into the pit alive.  Not to worry: we don’t actually see the victim being clawed and ripped to shreds.  Marshall is content with sound effects of the tiger growling and the unfortunate person screaming in agony. 

It’s rather perplexing that, given the fact that the pit is readily available, Tom doesn’t use it to get rid of Rob and Scarlett, instead just assigning two nonentities to take them out on the cliffs of Tenerife, where Rob has his estate, and shoot them.  But had he used the tiger, Kirk wouldn’t have been able to sob histrionically over her lover’s dead body, one of her more melodramatically unconvincing moments.  Nor would there have been a second half to the movie, something viewers might have appreciated but which would have precluded the “clever” ending where Scarlett escapes an assassination attempt and seems poised for a sequel no one could possibly want.

One could go on about the technical inadequacies of the movie—the sloppy action choreography, the cinematography (by Simon Rowling) that’s grubby even when the locations are attractive and, at least as edited by Marshall and Adam Trotman, leaves the innumerable fight scenes and gun battles looking chaotic (the comic-book style transitional swipes are also an irritating tic), the mostly gloomy production design (Jonathan McKinstry), the irritatingly cheeky music (Paul Lawler), which tries desperately but futilely to persuade us that what’s transpiring onscreen is exciting and/or amusingly violent.

But enough. Marshall lacks the skill to mimic Ritchie’s signature style, and Kirk, a blank-eyed Bridget Bardot without the talent, is even less appealing a protagonist than Jason Statham.  As to the plot, a remark offered by Meaney in his cameo applies:  “Stop looking for it to make sense, because it never will.”    On the basis of their joint efforts thus far Marshall and Kirk may come to be regarded as the new Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore.