CRIME PAYS OFF IN CHEEKY ‘PIXIE’
You had me at “deadly gangster priests.”
British director Barnaby Thompson’s coolly comedic “Pixie” — a sublimely cheeky take on the early Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”-style caper — may not be the most original in concept in the world but the winning execution makes up for it. And, yes, there really are deadly gangster priests.
The serpentine plot begins in small-town Ireland with Pixie O’Hara (Olivia Cooke from “Sound of Metal”), the daughter of homebody, low-level drug lord and widower Dermot O’Brien (Colm Meaney), plotting her escape into a more exciting, wider world, namely San Francisco. But she’s not content to scrimp together enough for an Uber to the airport and a plane ticket. She wants to avenge her mother’s death while landing in the States in style and, having learned a trick or two from dear old dad, her plot involves drugs, cash and murder.
Things don’t work out quite as planned and she ends up on the lam with two underworld neophytes — Frank (Ben Hardy, he played Queen drummer Roger Taylor in “Bohemian Rhapsody”) and Harland (Daryl McCormack, “Peaky Blinders”) — guys who become smitten with her in a bar who find out the hard way that her definition of a wild night is different from theirs. All of them end up under the gun from a squad of the dreaded deadly gangster priests (and one nun) led by El Chapo with a collar and longtime Dermot O’Brien foe, Father Hector McGrath (Alec Baldwin).
Working from a script by his son, Peter, Thompson may wear his influences on his bloody sleeve but he keeps the tone light, never straying too far into excess violence or struggling too hard to be clever. Cooke, Hardy and McCormack possess a combustible chemistry together, while Meany, once again, shows why he’s one of our best character actors. The one exception is Baldwin, who, while effective, has a presence these days that takes the viewer out of the film and into an “SNL” parody.
It’s also notable that, unlike the films to which it might be compared, “Pixie” features a woman at its center, and Cooke can more than hold her own as a lead.
Judging from the performances, Thompson — better known as a producer on the likes of “Wayne’s World,” “Coneheads” and the misbegotten Nina Simone biopic “Nina” — really should spend more time in the director’s chair. And he has the good sense not to overstay his welcome; the breezy “Pixie” clocks in at just over 90 minutes.
Kudos also go to cinematographer John de Borman (who worked on the gorgeously shot British TV series “Indian Summers”) for making the countryside of western Ireland look so entrancing that the region immediately shoots to the top of the list for post-pandemic travel. As Tina Fey, playing Liz Lemon in “30 Rock,” once famously said, “I want to go to there.”
So when Frank tells his partners in crime, “There’s no two people I’d rather be with, traveling down the coast with a boatload of MDMA and a rotting corpse, than the two of you,” you heartily agree.