I Am Extremely Excited for ‘Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers’ and You Should Be Too

In life we are divided into three: we are gangsters, we are gamblers, or we are geezers. The producers of Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers know this1, which is why they have made the film Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers: they know that fuck your horoscopes, fuck your love line, fuck your Hufflepuff and your Gryffindor, that the only way to split the population neatly in three like a finger pushed endways down a banana is to divide them up as so: as gangsters, as gamblers, as geezers. We are all ever thus.

Please take a moment to watch the trailer for Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers, which – as I am about to argue – may well turn out to be the most important British movie of all time. If you're currently on the fence about this – "Eh, I'm not sure I actually really want to spend one minute 27 watching this, I mean I'd have to find my headphones and angle my laptop around so my boss can't see me not working, I mean that truly is a lot of faff to clog up my day, is it really actually worth it," &c. – just know that Richard Blackwood is in it doing every accent from Barbados to Africa and, baffling and topless, the looming presence of what I can only assume is an insanely stoned Big Narstie in there as well. Yeah, now you're sold. Now you're listening to me. Press play:

I just want to say I am excited for you. I am excited for you for being about to enjoy this for the first time. This is a big moment for you. I am proud of you for getting here.

This is, of course, as so many things are, Guy Ritchie's fault. In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels2, Ritchie proved that all a British gangster movie really needed was i. some bloke with an exceptionally broken nose wearing a polyester-rayon zip-thru saying "cunt" really threateningly and ii. a diverse cast of characters who will help the clueless two co-leads on their journey to not getting their bollocks kicked in by a henchman (And so here are some lines that I can pretty much guarantee already are going to be in Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers based off this trailer alone: "You've got three days to get me my money"; "Listen here, CUNT!"; "*extremely Big Narstie voice* I've been shot, boss"), and now here we are. In this case, the case of GGG, the colourful cast of characters is instead represented by 'an erratic handful of cameos, presumably done to really drive down exactly how many actors needed paying day rate out of the film's meagre budget', a tactic I truly admire.

Here is Atomic Kitten Liz McClarnon aggressively doing airquotes in a way that suggests to me she is playing the key role of 'hard girlfriend of a nightclub owner, furious that his complex plan has yet to come to full fruition':

Here's Dave Courtney almost certainly about to say "fackin' mags":

Here is my new phone screensaver:

Here's Richard Blackwood doing 'angry while in a car', a look you assume he perfected after every single audition he did between the years 2001 – 2014:

Here is Jessica-Jane Clement, you remember, the girl w/ the shoulder tattoo from The Real Hustle, on BBC Three in 2006, you remember, who here plays 'girl dancing in car to music that has clearly been added in during post, because nobody dances that far off the beat of anything outside of a Rebecca Black video, unless they have a near-medical lack of rhythm':

Here's Richard Blackwood really having fun with it:

Here's a bag of prop money with exactly one visible £20 note in it, which really suggests to me that bag of prop money is actually filled with envelopes and scrunched up Tesco bags and exactly one £20 note that the gaffer on this particular shoot happened to have in his wallet and, now he thinks about it, never did actually get back:

Here is a van with the number plate 'GYP5Y5' which I can only assume belongs to the character – and this is a direct quote from IMDb – 'Paddy the Thieving Gypsy':

Here's Jodie Marsh, who is brilliant – Jodie Marsh once wore two belts as an outfit, is hencher than you will ever be, has maintained a decade-long beef with Katie Price AKA Jordan and has spent the past half-a-year slagging her ex-husband's dick off on Twitter, if that doesn't convince you Jodie Marsh is brilliant then nothing ever will do – and I can only assume that she is here to kick off a montage scene where she teaches the two main characters, Krish and Lee, to be hench, and think about it for literally one second: is there a single film on earth that could not be improved by a montage of Jodie Marsh making the lead character hench? Titanic: Titanic could be improved with a montage of Jodie Marsh making Leonardo di Caprio more hench until – finally, straining – he lifts the car he shagged Kate Winslet in. Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park could be improved with a montage of Jodie Marsh and a Tyrannosaurus doing kettle bells. Citizen Kane? Citizen Kane would be improved if, instead of going slowly raving and dying alone in Xanadu, Charles Foster Kane did burpees while Jodie Marsh, in a flouro tank top, shouted in an ever broader Essex accent that he was a "wet fucking rich twat". By extension, GGG is already primed to be the best film ever made:

And then there are a few, final, tantalising glimpses of one of the most lo-fi car chases ever committed to film, kind of car chase they didn't actually bother finding a closed road for, sort of thing you feel could have feasibly be done by a few of those squabbling dads who cycle around satellite towns with helmet cams on hoping a mum on the school run passes a bit too close to them so they can wind their window down and yell about the Highway Code. I'm going to guess at the plot here, guess with 100% accuracy: Krish and Lee managed to piss off and/or owe money to six separate gangs of person who all deem it necessary to chase after them very slowly in a vehicle. I'm going to guess this climactic chase takes up the last 30 to 40 minutes of the film. And then the gangs erase each other out, negatives wiping out other negatives, until the lead car hits a lamp post and everyone gets out and there is an exceptionally shitty Reservoir Dogs-but-with-one-camera show-down at the end where everyone has double-barrelled shotguns, for some reason, and our two heroes emerge unscathed, and yada yada yada the last scene is them both smoking cigars in a strip club, two girls in bandage dresses hanging off each of their arms, and they throw a wad of £20 notes (production secret: 100 pieces of note-sized paper + one actual £20 note, at the front) into the air and shout "GEEZERS!", freeze frame, The End.

The romance of shit British gangster movies. Because we try, don't we, but there's never any gloss. Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers is just one in a long line of mostly straight-to-DVD films about gangsters and geezers and gamblers made in the UK, this one being notable mostly for not having Tamer Hassan in it. And we keep making the same movie, over and over and over, again, and again and again and again, like a boot stamping on Dave Courtney's face, forever.

Most of the greatest and highest-regarded films ever made are about gangsters, too, which only serves to underline the key difference between American gangsters and their QVC-quality British equivalents. US gangster movies always involve some really wide guy eating a whole mess of pasta in a darkened room; British gangster films always involve someone in a leather blazer whispering and looking around in a greasy spoon café. US gangster movies always have visceral scenes of violence; British gangster movies always have a bald guy shouting, "I'LL NUT YOUR CUNT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING CUNT, YOU CUNT!". US gangster movies have a slow-mo shot of a supermodel walking down some marble stairs; UK equivalents have a glam cockney mum screeching the word 'OI!' as a car peels off a roundabout. US gangster films quietly pad around threats of injury, death; there is always a silent henchmen standing in a corner, cracking his knuckles against each other, extremely giving you the vibe that he's taken people's testicles out with pliers before; British gangster movies always have a large man called Tiny pointing a finger and saying he's going to run your mum over, you fucking nonce. I suppose this – inelegant, clumsy, low-res gangster movies – is our legacy, our culture, and we should embrace it. Passion project gangster movies funded by actual gangsters that say how great and fun being a gangster is: these are the future of our film industry. Gangsters, Gamblers and Geezers is a hall of famer waiting to happen.

@joelgolby

1. What they don't know, unfortunately, is how exactly they want to present the title of their film: the trailer is tagged as 'Gangster Gamblers and Geezers', no comma, word "and" spelled in full, which was uploaded by the account 'Gangsters Gamblers & Geezers Movie', which note has the ampersand in lieu of the "and"; the IMDb page, meanwhile, has run entirely out of punctuation and has just gone for the breathless 'Gangsters Gamblers Geezers', which just sounds like someone describing the crowd at a British boxing match while simultaneously jumping from a bridge to their death. If the producers of GGG would like to get in touch I would be happy to sit down with them and discuss commas. ↩

2. Now THERE'S a film that knows its own comma placement! ↩

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