Nemesis (2021)

This is one I've been meaning to get to for some time, especially since it's been available on Tubi here in the States. I remember when Shogun Films was first in the process of making it, they were posting updates on their Instagram page, building a lot of anticipation, so I'm glad now I'm finally able to make it happen. In addition to us, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action, and the guys at DTV Digest have also covered this. 

Nemesis has Billy Murray as John Morgan, a London crime kingpin who returns to the city after spending some time abroad. He and his wife Sadie (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) are attending a charity dinner, then hoping to meet their daughter's (Ambra Moore) girlfriend (Lucy Aarden). As you can imagine though, a crime kingpin with the career and success that Morgan has had would create many enemies, including disgraced police detective Nick Moran, Morgan's own brother (Frank Harper), and a rival kingpin who Murray kicks his earnings up to, Bruce Payne. All of these chickens come home to roost during Morgan's family dinner, and the question is, will he be able to make it out alive?

This felt like Shogun Films announcing their arrival, the kind of first film from a production company that lets you know they're only getting started. The biggest element for me was the characters, both how they were written and the actors playing them. Starting with Billy Murray is always a solid bet, and then they surrounded him with other UK stalwarts like Nick Moran, Bruce Payne, Frank Harper, and even Julian Glover; but also Lucy Aarden and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, who both don't have the experience those other names have, really held their own. I think from a story standpoint, a home invasion dynamic is always difficult to pull off, because we can only keep the players in that situation for so long before we feel like we're spinning our wheels; but I liked the attempt to mitigate that by devoting the first 45 minutes of the film to building the backstory, which created more of a slow burn vibe. Also this movie moves in some different directions from your standard home invasion or gangster film. Sothcott's Sadie is grittier and has more edge than the usual mobster wife, which made her a great wild card in this scenario; and I liked how I wanted to root for Billy Murray because he's so great, but here are Lucy Aarden and Nick Moran's characters to keep me from liking him. This really worked for me, and is worth checking out, at least on Tubi.

Nick Moran was one of my favorite parts of this. Here on our site, we usually only get to see him in the Billy Murray or Bruce Payne gangster role, which I also enjoy, but his job here as disgraced detective Frank Conway was fantastic. The movie is more centered on John Morgan and the chickens he has coming home to roost--one of which is supposed to be Moran--but Moran's performance elevates it beyond that. He was also great as the guy below Craig Fairbrass in Avengement, but I think that's the role we expect Moran to do and which he's always great at. What makes a movie like this work is when someone like a Moran plays someone we're not as used to him playing and he hits it out of the park.

With mafia movies and TV shows, there's a tradition of the gangster's wife being almost as iconic as the gangster himself. The thing that I liked about Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott's Sadie, is unlike Carmela Soprano, Karen Hill, or Kay Adams, Sadie felt like she had a grittiness to her that came from coming up in the same world Murray's John Morgan does. Out of those three, maybe Karen Hill would be the kind of wild card Sadie was during the home invasion, but even she wouldn't have had the edge Sadie did. Even though this film takes place in London and involves English gangsters, cinematically it can still be hard to get out from under the shadow of The Sopranos, Goodfellas, and The Godfather, but I thought the character of Sadie was one area where the film did that successfully, and Sothcott's performance added an element that we needed to keep us in suspense in the home invasion construct.

None of this works without Billy Murray in the lead. I remember when Shogun Films was giving us teasers on Instagram, there was one of Murray getting fitted for a suit, and there was a sense then that this could be good, but Murray is something else here. I didn't picture him gleefully setting a car on fire with someone who crossed him strapped inside when we were seeing those behind the scenes Instagram posts. Even his gangster walk as he's heading down the hallway to meet with Bruce Payne was one of those added touches I didn't know I needed. As the center around which everything else orbited, he had to be compelling, and he didn't leave anything to chance in his performance. From there we have Moran, Sothcott, Frank Harper, and Lucy Aarden all acting opposite him, and he becomes like a sun, where anything in his orbit that gets too close gets burned; but also in Sothcott and his daughter's case, (played by Ambra Moore, granddaughter to my favorite Bond, Roger Moore), he can give life too, and Murray plays that duality so well.

Finally, when I first started the DTVC back in 2007, one of the first sites that linked us was Bruce's Angels, a site that two women ran who were huge fans of Bruce Payne. I remember that was back in the MySpace days, and I had this cheap computer that had almost no RAM. They posted this big flashing Bruce Payne gif on my MySpace wall, and it froze my computer so I had to delete it. I felt so guilty, because it was such a nice gesture on their part. That was just before Kenner at Movies in the Attic also pinged me on MySpace to tell me how much he dug the site, but at that time I had no idea that my site would bring me into contact with so many people, and the woman at Bruce's Angels were just the start of that. Even though their site is no longer live, I've kept them near the top of my "Other Great Sites" section in honor of their early support, which played a big role in building the initial momentum that got us here, and for which I'll always be grateful.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can screen this on Tubi, which, at 90 minutes is a great deal. Jonathan Sothcott and Shogun Films are off to a great start with this one, and I can't wait to see what they do next with Renegades. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11618350

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!