High Life

Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Stephen Eric McIntyre, Joe Anderson, Rossif Sutherland

Directed by: Gary Yates

Written by: Lee MacDougall and Gary Yates

14A

Running time: 80 minutes

Rating: Three stars out of five

Veterans of the heist film know there are several vital ingredients to make your robbery go wrong: protagonists who are inclined to violence, lots of drug abuse and a sidekick named Donnie. Nor can you forget stupidity.

They’re all present in High Life, Gary Yates’s swift, slightly mad homage to Reservoir Dogs, minus the torture. High Life is an off-kilter gangster drama with comic moments — if you think a guy getting shot unexpectedly is funny — several dark twists, a sidekick named Donnie and endless stupidity.

It starts with a shootout while Dick (Timothy Olyphant), firing a gun, tells us, “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a lawyer.” The story moves backwards to three days earlier, when Dick, a hospital janitor, meets Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre), his ex-cellmate. Both men sport scruffy beards, but while Dick seems charmingly sensible, Bug has the wild look of murder in his eyes. Not exactly the guy you want to get involved with. Dick and Bug decide the way to get drug money is to rob one of these newfangled ATM machines: High Life is set in 1983, and the soundtrack is mostly an April Wine tribute.

“We need Donnie,” says Dick, and that cues the entrance of a mousey pickpocket (Joe Anderson). The fourth crew member is Billy (Rossif Sutherland), a handsome ladies’ man.

By the time the film loops back around to the first scene, things are going spectacularly wrong and High Life spirals into mayhem.

McIntyre gives the plot edge, and while High Life is a low-budget diversion, it’s neatly packaged. It could have used a more vivid Donnie, but you can’t fault its quotient of stupidity.