TWIN TOWN (36)

Directed by: Kevin Allen

Starring: Llyr Evans, Rhys Ifans, Dougray Scott, Dorien Thomas

The Pitch: A couple of joyriding teenage brothers wreak havoc in the Welsh town of Swansea.

Theo Sez: You can sort of see what they had in mind here - social comment dressed up as rude comedy, the TRAINSPOTTING formula transplanted to a smaller, more depressed place ("the graveyard of ambition," according to Dylan Thomas - whose name, significantly, means nothing to the characters). It sets out to be extreme, with deliberately unpleasant detail and more "fuck"s-per-second than (probably) any other movie - so that it's meant to be funny and ironic when characters talk about rugby (the national game, as important to the Welsh psyche as baseball is to the American) or a kazoo band plays the Laurel and Hardy theme, cutesiness viewed through the prism of the weird. It doesn't work for a second, mostly because it's not weird in any particular way - raw realism, sick surrealism and the just plain disgusting (what's with the decapitated poodle?) are interchangeably mixed, just as our (anti-)heroes veer from simpletons to tough guys without any obvious rhyme or reason. That they're played by two real-life brothers named Llyr Evans and Rhys Ifans may be a comment on the Welsh inferiority complex vis-a-vis the English, and the country's terminal confusion over its identity (they're not even sure how to spell their names!) ; then again, it may be nothing of the kind.