The Times (London)
January 20, 2000
By James Christopher

A glittering Brit cast make a spectacular mess of James Hawes's supposedly anarchic novel, Rancid Aluminium. Director Ed Thomas's perfectly ghastly thriller throws Rhys Ifans on the mercy of the Russian mafia led, naturally enough, by that well-known Soviet, Steven Berkoff. If awards were handed out for mangling - among other things, accents, plot and point - this chunk of Cool Britannia would sweep the board.

Ifans inherits a successful London business. But his psychopathic Irish accountant (Joseph Fiennes) pretends they are going bust, invites the mafia to bail them out, and plans Ifans's murder. Ifans merely has to prove to Berkoff that he's man enough to do "beezneez" with, and the lolly will flow. What exactly this "beezneez" is, is neither here nor there. The whole point of Ifans's adolescent 30-year-old is the quality of his sperm. Will he impregnate his lover (Sadie Frost), his secretary (Dani Behr), or Berkoff's Transylvanian daughter (Tara Fitzgerald)? You couldn't buy more vampy performances this side of a coffin.

So much for plot. What the lads do best is snort great, huge lines of cocaine in Nick Moran's drug den and emote like Frank Spencer. The girls happily drop their underwear for Ifans, and scowl at Fiennes. Shurely some mistake. Well, yes. Fiennes and his Bosnian Dublin brogue are a mistake, and Ifans looks as if he's been extracted from a U-bend. But these are parking ticket offences in a film whose charm is as transparent as tinfoil.

Financial Times (London)
January 20, 2000
By MARTIN HOYLE

Rancid Aluminium is as slick, shallow and phonily populist as New Labour. In the lovable-scallywag-plus- Tarantino-bloody-underworld school of new Britpack film, its garble of randy Cockney perkiness and murderous Muscovite mafia is neither funny nor thrilling. Rhys Ifans gives signs of having a wider range than the scrofulous Welshman in Notting Hill allowed him, and Tara Fitzgerald's hint of exotic self-parody as a Russian temptress is welcome; but Joseph Fiennes is ludicrously self-conscious as a Machiavellian accountant, and Sadie Frost's glottal-stopping drama-school monotone merely grates.

Rancid Aluminium
(18) Nick Moran. Dir: Edward Thomas.
UK. 1999.
98mins.
Rating: *
by Nick Curtis

Bad book, bad film. James Hawes's rackety novel about London wide-boys and Moscow gangsters becomes a mess of boyish, Brit-flick cliches under Ed Thomas's rankly amateurish direction. Rhys Ifans is the cockney publisher out of his depth among the Moscow Mafia and sundry women. Sadie Frost, Tara Fitzgerald and Dani Behr are the arm-candy, and they all sound badly dubbed.

Steven Berkoff and Keith Allen are the rent-a-Russians, and Joseph Fiennes is supremely unconvincing as Ifans's Irish nemesis. The plot - a contorted financial conspiracy hard-wired into a painfully British sense of male inadequacy and impotence - is incomprehensible, and proceeds by shouting, sweating lunges. The drugs, the guns, the suits and the brief presence of Nick Moran all look like craven attempts to cash in on the bankable cool of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Hawes's novel was pretty poor to start with: the fact that he adapted and coproduced this dreadful flick may have something to do with its failings.