Blue Iguana

AN orphan trains to become a wizard in this entertaining if very familiar fantasy starring Jack Black. GLENN Close enters the Oscars race in a drama about a longsuffering wife who hits boiling point. ANNA Kendrick and Blake Lively make decent double act in director Paul Feig’s comedy thriller.

ANDY’S RATING: ★★★★ In cinemas on Friday

THERE is nothing particularly original about this crime caper. It’s one of those knockabout affairs where criminals trade wisecracks and movie references during breaks between over-stylised shootouts. It’s the kind of thing you’d have seen on the “Action” shelf in Blockbusters alongside other Tarantino rip-offs like Killing Zoe and Get Shorty.

Blue Iguana may feel like it’s trying to jump on a very old bandwagon, but it’s still a heap of fun.

As is often the case, our story begins in a New York diner. Eddie and Paul (Sam Rockwell and Ben Schwartz) are two ex-cons who are spending their parole flipping burgers.

Plummy English lawyer Katherine (Phoebe Fox) walks in one day to offer them a huge wad of cash. All they need to do is head to London to steal a rucksack.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot more to it and they are soon caught up in another scheme involving an expensive diamond, a London mobster and a short-tempered Yorkshire barman (a hilarious Peter Ferdinando) who wears a mullet in honour of his dead father.

Rockwell, who won an Oscar earlier this year for Four Billboards, probably doesn’t need to pull off these kind of jobs any more. But I can see what he liked about writer-director Hadi Hajaig’s script.

The dialogue is witty, the plot is full of surprises and the violence is imaginatively staged.