On DVD: Ca$h

It’s a recession-set thriller in which a young couple are confronted with the temptation of a briefcase full of money, and a villain who grimly goes about teaching them its value. Sean Bean and Chris Hemsworth star but, says Emma Rowley, the gimmicky title is a clue that not everything in this production is top-dollar.

Chicago, the present day: a couple of armed robbers flee the scene of their crime with a suitcase full of loot. But the police give chase and one of the men (Sean Bean) throws the suitcase over the edge of the freeway and tricks his cohort into confronting the cops, who promptly shoot him. Having thus eliminated the evidence, all he has to do is get his brother to fly in from the UK and track down the case, while he sits back and waits to be released from Cook County jail.

Enter Pyke Kubic (also Sean Bean), a psychopath with the soul of an accountant. On the advice of his brother, he sets off to find out who in the last few days has bought a new car for cash. After a break-in at the DMV, Pyke has a fistful of auto pink slips and is on the hunt.

Sam Phelan (Chris Hemsworth), a young married man with money woes, is driving his battered Buick when a suitcase drops from an overpass onto the hood of his car and dents it. As he throws it to the side of the road, he sees a dollar sticking out and investigates, discovering stacks of notes. He takes the case and when he later catches up with his wife at a meeting with their bank manager to discuss an extension on their mortgage payments, he’s able to plop down the money they owe and the couple leave, elated. Their next purchase is, of course, a brand-new car.

The tension in Ca$h comes not from the hunt – Pyke catches up with the unfortunate Phelans pretty swiftly – but from his grinding insistence on recouping every last dollar they took, and forcing them into ever more damaging escapades to cover the cash they’ve already spent. An earlier confrontation with a motel manager over a measly $50 alerts the audience to the fact that he won’t be leaving without every cent of his money, something the Phelans only slowly come to understand.

This is the sort of hard-man role that Bean can take on with one hand tied behind his back. And that’s handy since, instead of fleshing out this threatening antagonist, the film loads him down with movie-bad-guy ticks and habits. He’s a red-meat eating, money-obsessed, heavy-smoking Northern villain with a love of a calculator – most of the time. But his oiled-up yoga sessions and Buddhist calm feel like traits stolen from a Nic Cage character in a very different film. Meanwhile (Thor-to-be and Star Trek’s George Kirk) Chris Hemsworth is stuck in a thankless role that sees him quickly capitulating to Kubik and then sighing and sulking his way through the rest of the flick, while Victoria Profeta’s lively performance as Lesley is hampered by unlikeable characterisation (Kubik’s vocal misogyny seems to be borne out in the world of this film by Lesley’s attempted seduction of her hostage-taker).

The film is most interesting in its attempts to explore the characters’ attitudes to money. Kubik’s law of the jungle philosophy (“It’s my money and I’ll keep it until a superior force takes it away from me”) is contrasted with the Phelans’ naive sense of entitlement (“We thought God smiled down on us” says Lesley) and the naked greed of almost all the other characters.

But in the end, the film is unsure of whether it is a character piece, morality tale or comedy/thriller and its wild shifts in tone undermine moments of tension and make it impossible to identify with the Phelans’ plight. As such, it’s a bit of a curio – enjoyable enough but never gripping, and downright silly in parts. Fans of Sean Bean, however, will find enough to keep them going until Irvine Welsh’s football comedy The Magnificent Eleven comes out later this year.

Rating on a scale of 5 dollars you’ll have to pay back: 2

Release date: UK – March 1, DVD release; US – limited cinematic release March 26
Directed by: Stephen Millburn Anderson
Written by: Stephen Millburn Anderson
Cast: Sean Bean, Chris Hemsworth, Victoria Profeta, Mike Starr, Michael Mantell
Rating: US = R; UK = 15
Running time: 108 minutes