Catherine Bray

Matters would have been improved from the audience’s point of view, however, if said digging had happened a little sooner; the film takes its sweet time to get to where we sense it’s going, and then quickly runs out of steam when it does.

In many ways this fairly nondescript film is the perfect vehicle for potentially dystopian tech: it’s under the radar, inauspicious and not likely to find itself widely watched.

The layering of one creepy thing on to another creates a sense of silliness rather than terror, leaving you with the sense that Coco Chanel’s maxim about the perils of over-accessorising – “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” – also applies to writing and editing horror movies.

The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.

The biggest problem with Outgunned though is that it seems to have fallen prey to one of the stupidest of modern issues in cinema: a luxuriously padded run time.

I’m sure there’s a way to make this theoretically fun premise work better, but regrettably Besson hasn’t found it.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is diverting enough to start with, as the plot clicks efficiently into motion with the requisite stabbings and impalings. Unfortunately, there’s not enough fuel in the engine – the characters don’t have quite enough to do, we can’t care quite enough about them, and the world-building is nearly-but-not-quite convincing.

Chalk it up to an insufficiently distinctive screenplay and underwhelming plot, but for Travolta, Cash Out feels more like a mercenary case of cashing in.