Son of a Gun

Ewan McGregor makes a decent fist of playing against type in this debut movie from Australian director Julius Avery, but the film's determination to pack multiple genres into a single film will likely leave audiences wishing he'd concentrated on just the one. McGregor's hard-bitten professional bank robber is serving a 25-year prison sentence when he is befriended by a teenage petty criminal (Brenton Thwaites) struggling to survive his own six months inside. McGregor agrees to help protect the youngster - but at a price. What begins as a gritty prison flick suddenly performs a hairpin turn into escape-movie territory, complete with machine-gun battles and helicopter chases, before it swerves into a heist-gone-awry set-up, as the fugitives attempt to turn over a gold mine. McGregor sails through the movie, obviously having great fun as a recidivist thief who won't let anything get in the way of his plans, and doe-eyed Thwaites is appealingly naive as the kid who looks, unwisely, towards him as the father figure missing from his own life. Sadly, Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) is disappointingly underused as Thwaites's love interest, while the underwritten blackly comedic ending proves to be at least one genre shift too far.