You're Dead (DVD)

You're Dead (DVD) ... flawed You're Dead aspires to being an elegant clockwork thriller, but gets bogged down along the way in various sorts of laddishness. As a second-generation gangster keen to prove himself, Rhys Ifans works a bit too hard at being a likable psychotic, and David Schneider's ingratiating puppy-dog eyes get used too much. John Hurt is extraordinary, though, as the burned-out case of a safe-cracker 20 years into a life stretch for a murder he didn't do, whom the others free from jail to help them in a robbery. We know from the start that things went horribly wrong and that young Jo (Claire Skinner) is the only surviving hostage--we also know that this has something to do with the rivalry between the old-style brutal corrupt cop Badger (John Benfield) and the woman forensic psychologist who has taken over the investigation. You're Dead has wit, surprises and some inventively unpleasant violence working for it, but never quite hangs together. On the DVD: the disc includes extensive interviews with the cast, and the writer-director, in which everyone talks illuminatingly about how much fun it was to work on the film; these overlap heavily with the material in a "making-of" documentary. --Roz Kaveney