After his 2002 thriller Reckoning Day sank without a trace, British director Julian Gilbey went 'gangsta'. He hired brother William to co-write Rollin' With The Nines, which is best described as "a belated Lock, Stock wannabe" with a hip-hop soundtrack. Vas Blackwood and Jason Flemyng engage in lots of gunplay, but failed to make a dent at the UK box office.
Shoot Now, Talk Later
An extra three minutes on the original running time are mostly devoted to bouncing collagen implants, originally deemed too risqué by the puritanical US censors. In a half-hour conversation with the filmmakers, director David Zucker, producer Robert Weiss and writer Craig Mazin bemoan how things have changed since Zucker directed Airplane! in 1980, when you could have bountiful close-ups of jiggling flesh and still get a PG-13 rating.
In their commentary for the film, the Gilbeys admit to making lots of compromises because of a low budget. Julian describes one of the shooting scenes as "Very TV, very Only Fools & Horses circa 1981," and states plainly, "It just didn't work." In fact he gets extraordinarily downbeat about his work, later criticising an exchange of dialogue as "so un-dramatic... very weak" and suddenly deciding that he will never again "have these bloody scenes with people just sitting down and talking!" Um, perhaps the fault is in the writing, Julian?
Thankfully he does acknowledge the efforts of his "obscenely talented" cast and there's the usual stuff about battling the weather and developing the screenplay, otherwise this commentary plays like a guide to how you shouldn't direct a film.
Rolling The Dice
An hour-long 'Making Of' documentary reveals that this was a "privately funded" venture so no doubt the Gilbeys will have to duck and dive to avoid getting 'capped'. The film's producer (and sometime music promoter) Pikki explains how he came up with the basic storyline and there's some waffle on the process of casting (using his connections in the music world) before production begins.
There's plenty of behind-the-scenes footage, but the points of interest are few and far between. The actors talk about the experience of working on a low-budget film, eg Flemyng worked for "a meat pie and a few pints of lager", and ended up buying everyone else lunch instead. For the stunt scenes, an ex-street hoodlum advises the actors how to get shot and buckle to the ground convincingly. (They don't teach that at RADA, you know.) Finally, 13-year-old boys will surely get kicks out of seeing a car being crashed into a tree for the woodland chase sequence. We're told the effects team includes some of the same personnel who worked on The Bourne Identity, but there's very little nuts-and-bolts info.
As it happens the aforementioned chase sequence was inspired by Julian Gilbey's short film Driver, which is included on the extras menu. A bawdy blooper reel and two music videos (the title song by North Star and Make Way by Corey J, Jagwa and Gabby Ranks) are thrown in too.
Unless you're into bloody exploitation, sandwiched between "bloody scenes of people just sitting around talking!" Rollin' With The Nines just isn't worth the gamble on DVD.
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