Monday 15 March 2021

Nemesis - Review

****


Screenplay by Adam Stephen Kelly
Story by Jonathan Sothcott and Adam Stephen Kelly
Directed by James Crow



Billy Murray


Nemesis is the latest offering from producer Jonathan Sothcott. Evidencing his canny eye for today’s zeitgeist, Sothcott’s picture delivers 90 minutes of unpretentious, thinly-plotted movie brilliance that’s guaranteed to cheer-up a locked down evening!

Character hardman Billy Murray, he of The Bill and EastEnders fame but with a string of cockney credits in TV and film stretching back to the 1960s, is London gangster John Morgan, recently exiled to Turkey. Flying in from his sun-drenched villa accompanied by moll/wife Sadie (ably performed by Sothcott’s real-life missus, Jeanine Nerissa), Morgan’s trip to London is ostensibly for he and Sadie to be introduced to Zoe (played by Lucy Aarden), the girlfriend of their daughter Kate (newcomer Ambra Moore). Of course as the plot spins out one learns that there is much more to this long-term villain, together with his nearest and dearest, than meets the eye.

Sothcott has assembled a cracking cast to flesh out his story’s deliciously two-dimensional characters, with family vengeances proving to be a recurrent theme. Nick Moran plays second-generation copper Frank Conway, an alcoholic who blames Morgan for his father’s death. And giving what turns out to be a very brutal twist on sibling rivalry, Frank Harper puts in a grisly performance as Morgan’s brother Richard, transforming a family get together around the dinner table into a charnel house of slaughter that would make Titus Andronicus blush. James Crow deftly directs and with a hint of 21st century noir thrown in, the story makes for a ripping (literally at times) yarn.  

Some of Nemesis' photography captures London in those heady pre-pandemic days (was it barely a year ago?) when the city’s streets teemed with activity, double-decker buses bustled and London was just, well, London. One can only pray for those days to return….

Until then, Nemesis will have to remain a home-viewed thrill. And with pop up cameos from the venerable and always classy Julian Glover, together with the Capital’s original Flying Eye Russ Kane, what’s not to love about this blood-drenched treat of a movie.


Available on DVD and digital download from 29th March

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