Review

Pusher

Rating: Two-and-a-half stars

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Don’t be surprised if you feel as if you’re watching a Guy Ritchie flick during Luis Prieto’s serviceable if redundant British remake of Nicholas Winding Refn’s 1996 Danish thriller Drive. Déjà vu is the sensation aroused most in this by-the-numbers, predictably nasty little crime drama that centres on a London drug pusher (Richard Coyle) whose life is on the line when he runs afoul of a vengeful druglord. There’s little here you haven’t seen before — cue the requisite thugs, the in-over-his-head protagonist’s reckless sidekick, and the coke-snorting stripper girlfriend (model Agnyness Deyne). Still, Prieto makes up for his inablity to convincingly evoke the grim, brutal intensity of the criminal underworld the title character inhabits with some genuinely suspenseful sequences, and Zlatko Buric is chillingly good as the deceptively charismatic Serbian drug kingpin he’s dangerously indebted to.

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