The Toll

The Toll is a laid-back, Welsh crime drama starring Michael Smiley, Iwan Rheon and Annes Elwy. The key adjective here is laid-back, it may be that somewhere along the production line someone mistook dull for cool. It kicks off with a toll booth operator (Smiley) on a near deserted back road meeting a police officer (Elwy), in order to get something off his chest. The first words in the film are, "This had better be fucking good". Hopeful prescience.

The film tries to spin a bunch of strands together, personified by big city gangsters, small city gangsters, village hoods, farmers and a local ambulance driver, who's fond of a spot of dogging. Sadly, these strands don't make much of a garment, they start to fray and hang loose around the film's saggy waist. The confusion is even alluded to in the dialogue, but that doesn't make up for the supposed clever clogs writing. The performances aren't too bad, and Elwy is really solid, but everyone seems laboured and weighed down by the material. Smiley is better in everything else I've seen him in (starting with the peerless Spaced, as bike courier, Tyres). It showed promise early on but quickly lost itself in the over-telling, the climax was unnecessarily 'Spaghetti-westernised' and some of the characters' choices were exceedingly hard to square with likelihood or common sense.

I've seen it compared to Fargo or The Guard but, apart from the attempted dry humour or casual violence, it really pales in comparison, even to those slightly above average films. Elwy could use this as a springboard to success but, unfortunately, there's not much else to recommend about this film.

The Toll opens on July 29th at The Luna.

See also:

The fantastic Twin Town (1997), directed by Kevin Allen, is how you do Welsh films, and because Thoros of Myr (Paul Kaye) AND Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) are both in this, do yourself the good deed of watching Game of Thrones again.