Shut Up and Shoot Me

Shut Up and Shoot Me (two and a half stars) Directed and written by: Steen Agro Running time: 90 min Country: UK / Czech Republic Stars: Karel Roden, Andy Nyman, Anna Geislerová, Robert Polo, Denisa Knoblochová ....

Bumbling Englishman Colin is the sort of person who frets endlessly about whether he left the iron switched on. He goes to Prague for a beautiful weekend with his wife, but she inconveniently gets crushed under a statue as he dithers with his head in a travel guide worrying over details. Colin quickly decides life is no longer worth while and hires his equally useless Czeck driver to put him out of his misery. Several fruitless attempts later, including sitting Colin on a bomb site and arranging for him to fall out with a mobster, they have someone else's dead body on their hands and no money.

Shut Up and Shoot Me has the potential to be an entertaining spoof, but falls short on many counts. The acting is unconvincing - well below par given the experience of the cast - and with the result that characters seem little more than well-worn caricatures. The interminable amount of time through which each joke is spread out is well beyond the capacity for laughs and suggests the story could have been condensed into a 20 minute short quite easily. As a full-length no-brainer it just about qualifies for a low attention span afternoon.

There is something amiable about a mix of nerds, a nymphomaniac, a gangster called the Butcher of Prague, and a miscellany that includes poisoning, blackmail, hiding of bodies and a high-kicking Butcher side-kick. It is director Steen Agro's debut feature film and perhaps in more experienced hands it could have turned out better, but it has sadly failed to achieve any real potential.