One Last Deal
Director: Brendan Muldowney
Cert: 16
Starring: Danny Dyer, Elliot Rogers, Carlos Bardem
Running Time: 1 hr 29 mins
Has Danny Dyer become a British national treasure? It does feel that way. The energetic eastender, as star of rough-edged flicks such as The Football Factory and The Business, began as a proud outsider to the snooty establishment. Later a pal to Harold Pinter, a convincing gameshow host and an actual EastEnder (he appeared in the BBC soap until 2022), Dyer has evolved into an immovable avatar of 21st-century England. More power to him.
Brendan Muldowney, Irish director of strong films such as Pilgrimage and Savage, tests the audience’s tolerance for unfiltered Dyer in this economic drama about a sports agent teetering between total annihilation and unimagined success. He is Jimmy Banks. But you could think of him as F***ing Jerry f***ing Maguire.
It takes a while for the full challenge to register. We are in Banks’s office as he prepares to hear the result of a court case involving his only significant client, a wayward footballer. He yells down the phone at potential clients. He yells down the phone at estranged family members. He yells down the phone at top-level coaches.
Hang on. It is going to be like this all the way through? Will we be stuck in the same small room with Danny Dyer – and Danny Dyer alone – for 90 minutes?
So it proves. Happily, our star – helped out by some energetic voice work down the old blower – has just about enough saucy graft to keep the project aloft. In truth, nothing about Jimmy’s situation surprises. “I don’t do cocaine for breakfast any more, so I suppose I’m cured,” he says. The script, by Peter Howlett, is a little too keen on explaining stuff the listener already knows.
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Something a little like a surprise lands when an anonymous blackmailer offers recordings of Banks’s client abusing women. Here the script struggles. The hero is eventually faced with a moral dilemma – something with which he is hitherto unfamiliar – but One Last Deal doesn’t have much worthwhile to say about the abuse, too common in real life, that women suffer at the hands (and fists) of pampered sports stars.
The picture, filmed in Ireland, works better in light-hearted geezer mode. A bit of boozing. A bit of fist-pumping. A lot of swearing. “I don’t just do this job! I am this f***ing job!” No better man.
In cinemas from Friday, March 13th