Mystery DVD Club No 17: Babyjuice Express

Joe Martin

One of, er, the dodgier entries in our Mystery DVD Club arrives on our reviewer's doorstep...

Published on Sep 18, 2009

I'll tell you exactly what I told my girlfriend when I unveiled Babyjuice Express and she first clapped her eyes on the front cover, featuring a load of guns aimed at a vial of creamy man-goo: "It's not what you think."

Well, as long as you don't think that it's a fairly run of the mill British comedy starring a few people who used to be in Casualty and That Guy From Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels But Who Hasn't Done Much Else Since. Nick Moran - that's his name and Babyjuice Express occasionally feels like an attempt to ridicule his far better known role in Guy Ritchie's cockney gangster film.

Thus, instead of having a cast full of men with rough accents running around with baseball bats and slamming heads in car doors, the gangsters of Babyjuice are all mostly clueless sods with a preference for racist slang and bewildered looks.

Not that you can really blame them for looking confused, though. The plot is an odd mix of crime caper and comedy, with the central quartet of characters scheming to ransom a vial of precious sperm back to a depressed and useless crime boss who mostly just does what his domineering wife demands. Moran, whose gang is made up of his girlfriend, boxing buddy and his only black friend, thinks it's a plan that will set them all up for life, but doesn't count on the inevitable complications that show up along the way. The script throws everything it can at the foursome, from crazed, sword-wielding men in dressing gowns to a consistently hopeless Welsh hitman, in an effort to keep the action moving.

It mostly works too, since this isn't really the type of film that relies on a sensible plot or deep characterization. Instead, all it really needs is for audiences to share a sense of exasperation for the wanna-be criminals - which is communicated in-film by Moran's girlfriend, who's played by the gorgeous Lisa Faulkner and provides at least one reason to watch the film.

Unfortunately, though, despite the gangster comedy styling and the Ritchie-esque riffs, Babyjuice Express still doesn't manage to ever become a film we'd really recommend. A lot of that is down to the meandering script, which bumbles over from one quote-unquote 'outrageous situation' to the next without ever giving the audience time to recover. There's no decent pacing here and what few laugh out loud jokes there are tend to pass in a blur of hastily delivered drivel.

There are precious few actual jokes too, with most of the humor meant to arise from the supposed hilarity of the various calamities the characters stumble into, something which is ruined by the transparent plotline and the fact that you never really care about the cast. Apart from the indignant (and frankly, uppity) Faulkner, the cast is a group of unsympathetic posers that we wouldn't mind seeing at the bottom of a gangster-dug ditch.

Despite all this, though, it's not a truly bad film and there are times when the director and crew struggle valiantly against their obviously shoestring budget and setting to create a film that is, if not recommended and uproariously funny, at least watchable and snigger-worthy. That alone puts it easily ahead of most films gathered into the Mystery DVD selection, even if it can't stand out on its own merits.