Peter Bradshaw 

Taking Stock review – larky comedy caper that doesn’t quite gel

It has some appealing quirky touches, but Maeve Murphy’s comedy might have worked better on the small screen
  
  

Taking Stock film still
Divertingly surreal … Taking Stock Photograph: film company handout

Maeve Murphy is the award-winning theatre and film director whose debut feature Silent Grace (2001) was a tough drama about Irish Republican hunger-strikers in women’s prisons. For her new movie, she has gone for a larky comedy caper – for me it didn’t gel, despite some divertingly surreal touches. Kelly Brook plays Kate, an out-of-work actor dumped by her boyfriend on the same day as being laid off from her humiliating stopgap job selling cutesy home furnishings. In a rage, she conceives a bizarre plan to rob this store of its cash takings, imitating her secret heroine, beret-wearing outlaw Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame. There are some nice exterior locations in King’s Cross, London: a nod to the Ealing classic The Ladykillers. It has a quirkiness that might have worked better on television.

 

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