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This film has an ancient charm, similar to one location action movie Rio Bravo or its sort-of remake Assault on Precinct 13. What stands out is the simple yet effective approach of possessing a heroic figure to defend a fort, who in this case is Deputy Tabby Temple (Nikki Amuka-Bird). The distant mountainous region, log cabin sheriff’s office, and heavily accented speech hints at retrograde culture. But the best part rests within how this film provides a comic twist to the story. The film was practically shot in Kosovo and features an almost entirely British cast, along with British writer-director Will Gilbey. Gilbey is making his first feature after years of working as an editor, writer, and Second Unit Director for the extremely accentuated Rise of the Footsoldier movies. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to see how sharp and tense the piece is, for a genre exercise. All and all, good luck to the whole lot of them. And on top of it, all the cast performed well and nailed the accent.
Amuka Bird, a Nigerian-Brit, was trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and, true to her expertise, gives a performance packed with superb physical skill and tenderness that keeps her onscreen with the viewers throughout. We meet Tabby first as someone limping around on a broken ankle that of course gets explained in more detail later. Because of her injury and the fact she’s been recently demoted for reasons to be explained later, she’s stuck on the ground and working the dispatch radio while her colleagues head off to probe into a murder. Which also means babysitting a drunk meth-addicted wife-beater (Michael Socha) in the cells, and her own rebellious teenage son Monty (Zack Morris from EastEnders), who has lately been getting into trouble and running with the local drug crowd. The film goes into left field from the huge shift that allows for Tabby to defend herself from the state police who are taking their sweet time. She’s equipped with an unreliable gun, and shoddy surveillance camera set up next to a radio. The set up also includes a locksmith (Philipp Christopher) who was supposedly coming to fix things after a recent break in but was revealed to not be a locksmith at all.
The final act falls into the trap of being somewhat predictable, but Gilbey manages to save it by pulling a couple of tricks, such as quieting the shots so that they sound like muffled puff noises, and placing remote cameras in police vehicles to capture action in different locations. Overall, Jericho Ridge does not have a strong message, but it is a decent first film, and at the very least, I hope it helped jumpstart the Kosovan film industry.
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Also Watch for more movies like: Jericho (2000)
