Mike McCahill 

Top Dog review – witless north-London ladsploitation

Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp directs a thoroughly templated London crime story that can't sustain any self-awareness, writes Mike McCahill
  
  

Top Dog
DVD is beckoning … Top Dog. Photograph: PR

Low-level ladsploitation, directed by Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp and adapted by Green Street writer Dougie Brimson from what's billed as his "cult novel", with family man Leo Gregory running into trouble amid the north-London protection rackets. "This is all a bit Lock, Stock, isn't it?" muses one ne'er-do-well, raising early hopes the genre might finally have become self-aware, but Kemp assembles the subsequent rucking in taprooms and damp alleys with scant style or wit: the incidental music's particularly offensive, and it's forever dubious around women. DVD surely beckons, yet the content is so leaden as to make that Spandau reunion seem creatively worthwhile.

 

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