Twin Town

Port Talbot, and school dropout twins Julian and Jeremy are revelling in daily joyriding, solvent abuse and petty vandalism. Meanwhile, over in the chintzier reaches of twin town Swansea, coppers Terry and Greyo, mates of bent building contractor Cartwright, argue about the appropriate scale of their drug deals. Their fates intertwine when the kids' father Fatty, engaged on a job for Cartwright, is hospitalised but refused compensation, triggering tit-for-tat threats, humiliations, slaughtered dogs and finally arson and multiple murder. This urban black comedy is a plain misfire. Strangely, for all its pulse-taking pretensions, it most resembles some old-fashioned criminal caper movie, albeit psyched-up and overdone for the '90s: the moral perspective has merely been flipped from the majority's to that of the confused offender, keeping the facile narrative and quaint social caricature intact. Llyr Evans (Julian) and Rhys Ifans (Jeremy), on the other hand, display a louche rude-boy energy that betokens fine things for the future.