Uncut Gems is extraordinary & unlike any film I’ve seen in years
DO you remember the sketch in The Fast Show where a family – led by a frantically screaming father – would be charging across airport terminals or train platforms?
Or that feeling when you’ve just realised you can’t find your passport? Or arriving home from school with a detention slip in your pocket?
That anxiety, that sheer lead-in-your-stomach lurch has been encapsulated in film format in the most tense and stressful 135 minutes you’ll have for a long time. It is also totally fantastic.
This crime thriller from the Safdie brothers stars Adam Sandler – NO, WAIT . . . COME BACK! HE’S BRILLIANT IN THIS – as jeweller Howard Ratner, a man who is the epitome of someone who “lives on their nerves”.
A chronic gambling habit has put him up to his ears in debt, with a string of heavies queuing up for their pound of flesh. His marriage is in tatters, and his relationship with his mistress – shacked up in his bachelor pad – is not faring much better.
All his hopes, and his future relationship with his limbs, rely on him getting a decent price for a rare black opal he has dodgily imported from Ethiopia. If it gets the $1million he expects, great. If not, well . . .
Naturally, the first thing he does is show off and lend the jewel to a famous basketball player.
It goes missing and so begins the cat and mouse story that left me having to go to the toilet just to catch a breath.
It is extraordinary and unlike any film I’ve seen in years. Sandler is incredible and the New York portrayed here is about as far from the glamour of Hollywood-style Manhattan as you can get – there is no Woody Allen romanticism.
The majority of the cast are first-timers, with a fair few being plucked from the Mob to chase Sandler across the city.
If the fear looks genuine, it probably has something to do with real blood being spilled. Sounds such as doorbells are used to infuriating effect, building up this film from a twitchy start to a whirlwind last half-hour that has you gripped.
In cinemas from today and on Netflix in a couple of weeks.