Final Score Review - Dave Bautista Flourishes In Absurdly Fun British Action Revival

And what transpires within is, depending on your disposition, either a film that's an over-the-top, cheesy, big, dumb, action flick with all its major beats borrowed very liberally from other movies, or a perfectly-pitched love letter to all of the above.

As a spectacle, there have been few movies come out of the UK - or indeed come out of this sort of budget - that have packed quite as much of a punch. Director Scott Mann has managed to piece together some genuinely visceral and gut-wrenching action sequences that include large-scale gun fights on top of a football stadium, claustrophobic scuffles in a lift, and one of the hardest to watch interactions with a deep fat fryer you're ever likely to see. A huge testament to the choreography and invention of the cast and crew is that Final Score contains quite so many "bloody hell" moments as movies 3 or 4 times its scale.

The terrorism premise at the heart of the matter, it should be said, plays out with scant regard for any sort of logical sense. The antagonists all hail from the fictional Russian satellite state of Sokovia (yes, the one from Avengers: Age of Ultron seemingly) and have, all at once, concocted a plan that is 50% impossibly genius and 50% impossibly naive. The latter element being just sufficient for one man to take them on single-handedly.

But I mean, hey, if this is a cinematic world where you're happy to accept the premise of West Ham being 90 minutes away from a major European final, are a handful of narrative gaps really that much of an ask?

No, they are not.

Speaking of comedy, the lighter moments of the film actually play surpassingly well in between the explosions, mutilations and dead father McGuffin. Predominately led by comic-relief Faisal (an almost show-stealing performance from Amit Shah), Final Score manages to find just enough cracks in its burly action exterior to deliver a few moments of clever brevity.

Shah is, comfortably, the supporting cast's strongest performer and even turns in a wonderfully well-handled performance in spite of some potentially tricky writing. Casting a man of Indian-descent in the role of safety steward, in the middle of a terrorist attack, invites some easy jokes from the film's writers, but thankfully Shah plays them all with a straight bat.

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