The Language Barrier as Comic Device in Crime Films
What happens when the criminals in a crime film can't understand a word anyone around them is saying? The genre has a standard answer: tension, danger, miscommunication that gets people killed. Crime films tend to treat language barriers as threat amplifiers. Crime comedies discovered something more interesting. The inability to communicate does not have to produce menace. It can produce humiliation, absurdity, and a very specific kind of helplessness that is, structurally speaking, one of the funniest positions a character can occupy.
This essay is about how that works. Specifically, it's about the formal mechanics of using language barriers as a comic device in crime films, and why the device works best when it's treated not as a plot obstacle but as a condition: an ongoing state of incomprehension that shapes every scene rather than generating a single crisis to be resolved.
The mechanism: why incomprehension is funny
Humour, at its most basic structural level, relies on violated expectation. You set up a frame, you subvert it, the audience registers the gap. Language barriers produce violated expectations constantly and automatically. A character walks into a shop expecting a normal transaction and instead receives a stream of Lithuanian. They try again, louder, in English, with exaggerated enunciation. The shopkeeper responds, again in Lithuanian, with evident patience running out. Nothing is resolved. The scene ends without a transaction having occurred.
The comedy there is not about any individual joke. It's about the gap between what the character expected commerce to involve and what it actually involved. The setting refused to accommodate the character's assumption that things would simply work. This is the fundamental dynamic of displacement comedy, but language makes it more precise than any other cultural barrier, because language failure is total and immediate. You can misread a social cue and not know you've misread it. You cannot fail to understand spoken Lithuanian and remain unaware of that failure.
Research from the Stanford Linguistics Department on code-switching (moving between languages in a social context) notes that it carries significant status implications. In crime films especially, the inability to code-switch places the monolingual character at the bottom of every social hierarchy they enter, regardless of how dangerous they might be. A man with a gun who cannot explain what he wants the gun to do is operating at a disadvantage no amount of menace fully compensates for.
The British crime film and the monolingual tradition
British crime cinema has a particular stake in this dynamic. The genre, from The Long Good Friday through Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and on to more recent entries, built its aesthetic on a very local, vernacular authenticity. The language of British crime film is London-specific, class-inflected, heavily idiomatic, and largely untranslatable. That's a source of identity, not a weakness: the genre's confidence comes partly from its refusal to universalise, its insistence on speaking to a specific audience in a specific idiom.
The problem arrives when that idiom leaves home. A British criminal who commands a room in Peckham does not automatically command a room in Vilnius. The authority built through language (the controlled register, the knowing slang, the ability to modulate threat) disappears the moment the environment stops recognising it. What's left is a person who is physically present but communicatively absent. This is a genuinely diminishing situation, and the crime comedy form is the correct container for it, because the comedy emerges naturally from the character's refusal to accept how diminished they are.
Redirected and the practical management of incomprehension
Emilis Vėlyvis's Redirected (2014) is the most sustained and formally interesting use of the language barrier as comic device in recent British crime cinema. Four British criminals arrive in Vilnius after a heist gone wrong and spend most of the film unable to navigate a country whose language they do not speak, whose criminal networks they cannot access, and whose social conventions they consistently misread.
What Vėlyvis does with this premise is more sophisticated than simply staging scenes of comic incomprehension. He uses the language barrier to reconfigure the power relationships that British crime film normally relies on. Vinnie Jones's character carries an enormous amount of physical authority, baked into Jones as a performer, part of what he brings to any role. In Vilnius, that authority is consistently deflated not by a stronger antagonist but by a world that simply doesn't acknowledge it. Local criminals don't defer to him because they don't know who he is or what he represents. Local civilians don't respond to his register because he's speaking the wrong language entirely.
The film's Lithuanian dialogue is particularly well-handled. Rather than using subtitles ironically or leaving the audience as lost as the British characters, Vėlyvis subtitles the Lithuanian scenes fully, which gives the audience information the British characters don't have. This creates a layered dramatic irony: we can see exactly how the British criminals are being discussed, evaluated, and managed by the Lithuanians around them, while the British characters operate in a fog of misapprehension. The effect is closer to theatrical dramatic irony than to the opaque otherness that less thoughtful films might have used. For more on how the film manages its dual cultural perspective, see the production case study.
Comparable films and their approaches
The language barrier device appears in crime comedy more broadly, though rarely with Redirected's systematic commitment to it. In Bruges uses cultural and linguistic difference (Belgian French, Flemish, the formal register of the city itself) without making incomprehension a central formal element. The criminals in Bruges speak English to everyone they meet. The displacement is cultural rather than linguistic, which is a meaningfully different thing.
The A Fish Called Wanda uses American-British cultural difference, which is linguistic at the margins but not at the core: both groups share a language, and the comedy comes from how badly that shared language conceals incompatible assumptions. John Cleese's barrister and Kevin Kline's Otto understand each other's words perfectly while understanding each other's intentions not at all. This is a sharper kind of comic device in some respects, but it lacks the total incomprehension that Redirected deploys.
Among non-English-language films, a number of French and Spanish crime comedies use similar mechanisms when French or Spanish criminals operate in environments where their languages carry no social currency. The BFI's Sight and Sound has noted that European crime cinema in particular uses geographical dislocation, alongside the linguistic failures that accompany it, as a way of interrogating national identity through genre. The criminal abroad is a recurring European figure precisely because it allows the genre to examine what constitutes competence when the home context is removed.
Academic work in this area is limited but suggestive. Research from the USC School of Cinematic Arts examining genre hybridity in post-2000 European crime film argues that language and landscape function as "co-protagonists" in displacement narratives: they are not settings in which action occurs but active elements that shape what actions are possible. That framing describes precisely what Redirected does with Lithuanian as a language environment.
The American film industry's relationship with multilingual crime comedy is more complicated. Hollywood crime films have historically used foreign language as a marker of threat: the villain speaks another language, the protagonist does not, the gap marks the line between the comprehensible world and the dangerous one. Crime comedies that use incomprehension as humour rather than menace tend to be independent productions or international co-productions, which is why Redirected occupies the position it does. The Library of Congress's film preservation program has noted that smaller-scale international productions often innovate at the formal level precisely because they lack the resources to compete on spectacle.
What the device achieves formally
The language barrier as comic device does several things simultaneously. It strips the crime film's characters of their primary social tool: the ability to project identity through speech. It creates conditions of genuine humility, where characters who believe themselves competent are visibly not competent and cannot manage the impression they make. And it generates a structural irony that can be sustained across an entire film, rather than resolved in a single scene.
For Scot Williams and Oliver Jackson's characters in Redirected, the language barrier is not something to be overcome. It is the condition of their existence in Lithuania for the duration of the film. That persistence is what makes it formally powerful rather than merely situationally funny. The condition produces comedy. The comedy reveals character. The character, stripped of its normal social supports, turns out to be less formidable than it presented itself to be. That's crime comedy doing what crime comedy does at its best: taking the genre's conventional figures of competence and systematically undermining them.