The shallow, derivative and contrived British heist thriller “Wasteland” lives down to its unfortunate name.
Beginning with a touch of Keyser Soze, the film stars a watery Luke Treadaway as an innocent victim of a drug setup who is recounting the details of a crime gone wrong to a no-nonsense detective (an engaging Timothy Spall). Harvey (Treadaway) has taken a vicious beating from a gangster named Roper (Neil Maskell), who stashes his money in a social club that Harvey and three friends were trying to rob.
In a series of increasingly improbable flashbacks, we learn that the lackluster, woebegone Harvey has a supermodel-hot girlfriend (Vanessa Kirby) and three friends, each of whom is willing to risk his life for a shot at one-eighth of a small coffee shop in Amsterdam.
Harvey just happened to overhear in prison exactly where Roper, the man who put him behind bars, stashes his fortune and later discovered that Roper’s safe sits conveniently on top of a sewer drain that more or less invites the public in to take a crack at it. This is also the kind of movie where, if the script needs a thug to get hurt, it has him suddenly look the other way while standing directly in front of some guy with a crowbar who wants to kill him.
Americans will have difficulty deciphering the thick Yorkshire accents, but what’s a bigger mystery is how such a weak first draft of a script got made into a film.