Big Hair

It's interesting to see Helen Mirren in her early thirties, but this film doesn't do her any favours, being rather flat and uninvolving. The main problem, I think, is with the structure of the narrative. We're thrown too early into the relationship between John Shea's young American and the middle-drawer brass played by Mirren with only a couple of brief scenes to establish any idea of character and a few snatches of dialogue to give us background. The upshot of this is that it's difficult to care about either of them, and when he succumbs to the inevitable jealousy and insecurity about her past, it seems presumptuous. There are about forty minutes of this and then, wallop, we're in to a heist movie: too much event riding on too little information.