The Business Review

With its postcard-coloured visions of package-holiday luxury, inside-the-good-old-days-of-the-drug-biz plot arc and soundtrack assortment of backlist hits, The Business shamelessly scrambles elements from Sexy Beast, Blow and Layer Cake. Unfortunately, its nostalgia for a decade most want to forget makes it feel horribly like desperate '80s Brit efforts like Buster, Dealers or (at best) The Hit.It's all here: sun-tanned Cockneys snarling "cunt" at each other between matey rhyming slang; trophy girlfriends in eye-abusing outfits with obvious hidden agendas; cocaine-snorting jags that come down with a bump (or a severed head on a pole); a voiceover explaining what a larf it all was even if it was doomed to turn out badly; character actors like Geoff Bell doing 'charismatic villain' while the lead (Dyer) is stuck with 'babyfaced clot' until hard-to-care-about reversals during the last reel.The director-stars team from The Football Factory, it appears, have taken the Spanish location jaunt as an excuse to be lazy rather than inventive. Some elements are engaging (Bell is a great ginger-bastard bad guy) but, lumbered with a script full of moments where characters do incredibly stupid things to keep the story going, Nick Love’s latest simply isn’t distinctive enough to make an impression in a very overcrowded field.