The Bezonians review – Vinnie Jones cameo can’t lift Homer-inspired crime yarn

You can sort of tell what kind of film writer-director-co-star Savvas D Michael thought he was making, given the lofty references to Homer’s Iliad in the plotting, Martin Scorsese movies in the dialogue, and Guy Ritchie in the casting – given the presence here of Vinnie Jones in a cameo role. However, the result is an intensely irritating hot mess, a London petty criminal story set in the Greek Cypriot community that’s offensive, self-indulgent and stupid.

The title refers to a private club of the same name, run by one Plato Andinos (Andreas Karras), a small-time big shot who likes to throw parties with strippers for his mates, and preaches homophobia and sexism at home to his kids. His wife, Helen (Marina Sirtis, from Star Trek Generations) puts up with it all because she gets knockoff designer handbags and a tacky house that makes the cribs in The Only Way Is Essex look like items from Architectural Digest. But Plato’s home life is only peripheral to the story, which mostly revolves around the exploits and hijinks of him and his crew, a motley selection of knaves, one of whom is a supposedly handsome and supposedly unbeatable scrapper named Achilles (played by Michael himself).

Stung when his romantic overtures are rejected by local beauty-cum-poker-hustler Lola (Lois Brabin-Platt, whose display of sass represents one of the film’s few amusements), Achilles goes into a sulk in Homeric fashion. This causes considerable distress in particular to Achilles’ No 1 fan, Anthony (Jamie Crew), seemingly also expected to be considered an object of pity given Crew’s manic and mannered display of verbal diarrhoea, delivered with a speech impediment and jerky movements.

Perhaps Anthony is the character for whom we’re supposed to feel sorry. That said, hardly anyone is even vaguely likable here, which needn’t necessarily have been a drawback, but they should at least be in some way interesting. No such luck. Londoners may find amusement in trying to guess where the exteriors were shot.