This dark-edged screwball comedy takes a woolly twist on the long-con idea.  Bainbridge (Sam Massey) regularly dupes hapless chumps into hiring him as their 'crime coach', tricking them into planning and executing a robbery for which they will ultimately take the fall.  However, it turns out that Bainbridge is in debt himself to crime boss Kenneth (Joerg Stadler), who gives him one last assignment in order to clear his slate.

Meanwhile, slow-witted but earnest traffic warden Freddie (Philip Weddell) finds himself fired, dumped and the bank foreclosing on his grandma's house all in the space of a day.  At his lowest point he is discovered by Bainbridge who offers him an easy way out of his financial predicament.

An air of classic Ealing comedies via the kinetic style of Edgar Wright, this thoroughly British flick manages to add an eccentric skew to the criminal genre.  Thanks in part to Henry Scriven's lively direction, frequent fantastical lunges deliver welcome jolts, and the script - co-written by Scriven and Michael Delwiche - is peppered with off-beat, oddball touches, such as Kenneth's surreal proverbs or a poetry obsessed, recurring desk clerk.

Massey and Weddell make for a good mis-matched pairing, the balance of their respective stupidity see-saws nicely throughout the film, and Massey does great work in earning the audience's sympathy despite being a no good crook.  Weddell's Freddie walks the fine line between being an unimaginable imbecile and identifiably idiotic.  Wisely his foolishness is often played as a mixture of naivite and childlike innocence; one particularly nice scene sees Freddie showing Bainbridge what he does to let go of his stresses.

Stadler makes for a good villain, menace bubbling under the surface, and he has a fine pair of goons in the shape of Gideon Turner's Frank and John Fricker's Bruno.  In fact Turner gets away with grounding, and rendering very funny, one of the film's more ludicrous scenes as Freddie tries to create a diversion.

The rest of the cast is rounded out by some game performances, especially from Ed Coleman as the Bank Clerk and Zoe Richards as a cartoonish master of disguise.

Stylistically the film flips between grounded farce and more heightened moments, surprisingly it's the latter that work best, with the film's comedic highlight being the extremely bonkers revelation as to why Bainbridge owes a debt to Stadler.  Overall, it's a fast-paced, inventive ride that isn't afraid to jump into wackier territory, which helps distinguish the film from similar British black-comedy capers.

http://howtobecomeacriminalmastermind.com/