It’s safe to say that few are going to expect much from Dead Man Running, a film written and directed by Alex De Rakoff (who previously helmed the Orlando Bloom flop The Calcium Kid), and produced by the likes of footballers Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole. This is gutter-grade cinema for sure, but there are some perverse pleasures in this film that are almost embarrassing to admit, and while painfully lacking in originality and only intermittently engaging, this isn’t the total bust that you would reasonably expect.

Beginning with a timely prologue, where the recession has caused loan shark Mr. Thigo (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) to tighten his belt and call in all outstanding debts, one of his debtors, Nick (Tamer Hassan), is then given an absurd 24 hours to pay him back the £100,000 he owes him, or he will be killed. What’s more, Thigo has arranged for Nick’s wheelchair-bound mother, (Brenda Blethyn), to be held captive during the fiasco, giving Nick an incentive beyond his own life. Thus, Nick calls upon his pal Bing (Danny Dyer), and his tenuous girlfriend Frankie (Monet Mazur) to help him find a way to come up with the cash.

This sort of plot has been rehashed time and again, and although the treatment here is anything but original, the film at least keeps the pace mostly frenetic; it would be difficult to describe this as boring, even if it seems oddly low-budget despite being produced by two wealthy footballers. Indeed, Dead Man Running quickly establishes its premise and then rolls with it; Nick hurries from one zany scheme to another, including “borrowing” money from a store owner, then getting in a fight on which Bing bets, then attempting to fiddle a greyhound race, and finally taking a trip to Manchester to try and offload a tonne of drugs, resulting in even more absurdity as they attempt to outrun the law and stay alive. Although the execution is nowhere near as robust nor the tone as knowing, the film earns a few favourable comparisons to Crank; it only rarely takes an expository breath, and is fully aware of how thoroughly ridiculous it is.

The chief problem is that it’s just not zany enough, though; there are some fun encounters, but the low-budget is evident through the lack of gunfights and over-the-top action that would certainly have befitted something this low-rent. Rather, the film has to rely on the personality of its characters who, while charming in an I’d-never-want-to-touch-them sort of way, aren’t developed enough to keeps things solely afloat. 50 Cent mumbles through most of his lines as usual, yet thankfully his screen time is limited to a book-end at the beginning and end of the film, while Danny Dyer, although serviceable, looks like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in a few years. Hassan himself makes a decent enough lead, but despite having an ailing mum, he’s not sympathetic much because his character mostly just looks stern and simmers without ever giving anything away; we never get under his skin. Speaking of his mother, though, Brenda Blethyn is the unqualified, rather beguiling treat of the production, who steals every scene that she’s in.

To Rakoff’s credit, he does manage a few rug-pulls near the end, and although we’ve seen these turns better executed before, they do at least catch the viewer unawares, perhaps because expectations are so low that one hadn’t thought to fathom the possibility of something clever slipping in. With some fine-tuning, the almost deus-ex-machina ending could have worked as a mystical musing on the gangster lifestyle, which would have been rather unique and compelling, but like everything else in this film, it just never goes far enough.

Aside from boozed up lads, few audiences are probably expecting much from this film, but it delivers some basic goods and a few genuine laughs even if it’s exceedingly rough. Rakoff agreeably ramps up the farce at times, and if the script had undergone some judicious re-writing, this would have no-doubt worked as a quirky, Coen-esque thriller. Also, the film is outlandish enough that it would be just as entertaining if the soundtrack was replaced with the Benny Hill theme tune; perhaps that’s something worth considering for the DVD.