Having shot five films since 2020, 82-year-old Martin Campbell is a certified member of the post-retirement director’s club that includes Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen et al. Samuel L Jackson (a mere 77) sports his worst hairdo since Jackie Brown – a grey, crimped ponytail with an undercut – in this overworked crime caper, though he is on positively cuddly form by his standards.
Interrupting his retirement on a Spanish-speaking Caribbean island with the odd poisoning (seen in the intro), kingpin Jack Wolfe (Jackson) is getting antsy. Afraid the law is close behind him, he hatches a scheme with his philandering wife Nora (Eva Green): help him frame her surfer lover Chad (Jason Fernández) for his supposed murder, and they will split the big-bucks insurance payout. He covers his back for the possibility she might do him in for real by recording her saying as much. But she ropes Chad anyway into her murder conspiracy, plotting to let him take the fall – or perhaps her detective bit on the side Dani (Eoin Macken) will get there first.
Trying to follow the particulars will probably age you by a couple of decades – especially once Jack turns the tables on Nora by approaching Chad with his own proposition. Not that following it is really the point: this throwback Elmore Leonard-esque business is the backdrop as the married couple tear strips out of each other. But lacking much mordant snap in the dialogue, and dependent on a trio of over-familiar stereotypes – droll gangster mastermind, uber-MILF gold-digger and airhead surfer – it’s never quite as funny or sharp as it thinks it is.
It has its moments, though; mostly when the seasoned players really get their claws into the hapless Chad. First Green, her natural bearing making Nora a proper piece of work, hammers it home that her scheme is an offer he can’t refuse; then Jackson chivvies him into signing up as his improbable adopted son. But by kicking off with some Tarantinoesque ring-a-ding non-linearity, before chucking in a few imagined homicide scenarios for the climax, then gratuitously retconning the ending, Just Play Dead strains a lot only to wind up faintly engaging. Reclining on his wicker lounge furniture, pulling the strings over a cocktail, Jackson is like the Jackanory narrator of this self-satisfied enterprise.
• Just Play Dead is on digital platforms from 5 October
