- Director:
Mel Smith - AMG Rating:
- Genre: Comedy
- Movie Type: Crime Comedy, Farce
- Themes: Women's Friendship, Cons and Scams, Blackmail
- Main Cast: Darren Boyd, Minnie Driver, Mary McCormack, Kevin McNally, Mark Williams, Danny Dyer
- Release Year: 2001
- Country: US/UK
- Run Time: 85 minutes
Plot
In this broad comedy from sometime comic actor Mel Smith (The Tall Guy), two women find themselves fleeing criminals. Minnie Driver stars as Shannon, a London nurse who finds her boyfriend Ray (Darren Boyd), a "sound sculptor," becoming increasingly dull and inattentive. When he forgets her birthday, she decides to hit the town with best pal Frances (Mary McCormack), an American actress wasting her time in a terrible small-theater production. Returning to Shannon's apartment, the girls overhear a cell phone conversation on Ray's scanner chronicling the ten million dollars stolen from a safe-deposit box. When police are uninterested in their information, the girls get an idea to blackmail the robbers to get a share. The criminals, led by the hard-as-nails Mason (Kevin McNally), counteract with their own scheme, and the caper begins to go wildly out of control. Similarly plotted to the 2001 release Beautiful Creatures, but much lighter in tone than that dark suspense thriller, the film co-stars Michael Gambon, Danny Dyer, and Mark Williams.~ Jason Clark, All Movie Guide
Review
With its bumbling take on the London crime scene and love for heavy artillery, High Heels and Low Lifes is kind of like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Tarts -- though the "tarts" in question are only mistaken for prostitutes, and only one of them smokes. Director Mel Smith confidently transplants the criminal quirks and clipped menace of a Guy Ritchie film into a female-empowerment buddy comedy. It's as fun as it is frivolous -- which is to say, a lot on both fronts -- and even manages to include a few split screens and other snazzy visuals. American Mary McCormack and Brit Minnie Driver are the stylishly dressed, haphazard amateurs, whose poor anticipation of thug reprisal nearly gets them killed on several occasions. Driver in particular gets huge mileage from her charming array of facial expressions, from surprised to rattled to gleeful. While the struggling actress played by McCormack gets plenty of real-world opportunities to ply her trade, Driver too, a nurse, finds herself repeatedly applying pressure to bullet wounds, even sometimes yelling to a downed adversary that she'll call for an ambulance. It's when the film gives itself over to these sillier escapist instincts that it begins to fly. High Heels and Low Lifes starts out with some false, self-conscious gestures toward scruples and soul-searching, including a trumped-up shouting match between the two conflicted leads. But when it settles into an amoral but lightweight cartoon, meant for kicks rather than realism, it hits the mark. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie GuideCast
- Minnie Driver - Shannon
- Mary McCormack - Frances
- Kevin McNally - Mason
- Mark Williams - Tremaine
Danny Dyer - Danny
