How to Watch International Crime Comedies: A Viewer's Framework
According to the British Film Institute's Statistical Yearbook, international co-productions now account for over 40 percent of all UK films certified in a given year — yet survey data consistently shows that Anglophone audiences rate subtitled or culturally hybrid films significantly lower in initial engagement, even when those same films receive higher critical scores after completion. That gap — between engagement on first encounter and appreciation after completion — is the central problem this framework addresses.
Redirected (2014) is a productive test case precisely because it falls into the zone where that gap is largest. The film is partially English-language, partially Lithuanian-language, directed by Emilis Vėlyvis, and built around a displacement premise that requires viewers to calibrate to a foreign operational environment rather than a recognisable domestic one. Audiences who approach it with genre expectations calibrated to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) often find the first act disorientating. Audiences who reach the Lithuanian sequences with those expectations adjusted consistently report a sharper appreciation of what the film is doing.
The framework below is structured in five steps, each addressing a different calibration problem.
Step 1: Identify the production origin — not just the language
Most viewers categorise films by their primary spoken language. This is a reasonable shortcut for domestic genre cinema, but it fails systematically with international co-productions. Redirected is a Lithuanian-British co-production: the financing, the director, the location, and a substantial part of the cast are Lithuanian, while the lead ensemble and the screenplay's register are Anglophone. Treating it as a "British crime film that happens to be set in Lithuania" misreads its nature at a structural level.
The practical effect of getting this wrong: viewers import genre expectations from the British crime comedy tradition — rapid-fire verbal comedy, London-specific class texture, a competent ensemble executing a high-concept plan — and find the film wanting on all three counts when measured against Lock, Stock or Snatch. The comparison is coherent if the production origin is misread; it becomes inapplicable once the production's actual structure is understood.
The corrective step: Before watching, check the production company credits, not just the distributor. IMDb's production company field is a reasonable starting point. For Redirected, the Lithuanian production context explains the pacing, the location texture, and the degree of screen time given to Lithuanian-language sequences — none of which are the result of English-language production decisions.
Step 2: Locate the genre hybrid — both halves, not just the dominant one
Crime comedies are hybrid genres by definition, but the balance between the two halves varies considerably. Crime comedy as a form, as film scholars have documented it, ranges from comedy-dominant (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) through roughly equal hybrids (In Bruges, 2008) to crime-dominant films with occasional comic relief (No Country for Old Men, 2007 — which some critics treat as a dark comedy despite the genre classification). Placing a film incorrectly in this spectrum produces mismatched expectations that persist across the entire viewing experience.
Redirected sits in the roughly-equal-hybrid category, but with an asymmetry: the comedy is concentrated in the first act and in specific recurring character beats (the Vinnie Jones scenes), while the middle act — the rural Lithuania sequence — operates closer to thriller territory. Viewers expecting consistent tonal balance across 99 minutes will find this jarring. Viewers who know to expect tonal variation as a structural feature of the particular hybrid they're watching will find it coherent.
The corrective step: In the first twenty minutes of any crime comedy, note whether the comedy is arising from character, situation, or dialogue — and whether the crime plot is generating genuine tension or functioning primarily as a comic engine. The balance you identify in the opening will tell you what register the film is operating in and where to calibrate expectations for the middle and final acts.
Step 3: Decode the displacement logic — why these people, in this place
Displacement is a structural device common enough in crime comedies to constitute its own sub-category. In narrative terms, displacement generates comedy and tension by moving characters into environments where their competencies no longer apply — where their skills, knowledge, and social scripts are systematically wrong for the situation they find themselves in. In Bruges (2008) is the classic recent example. Redirected continues that tradition but makes the displacement more complete: the leads are not just unfamiliar with Vilnius but actively incapable of reading its operative social structure, its criminal economy, or its language.
The displacement logic in Redirected is not decorative. The Lithuanian setting is not a backdrop chosen for production cost reasons alone — though the Lithuanian Film Centre's co-production incentive structure (documented on their official site) did make the production financially viable in a way a UK-only shoot would not have been. The location is the operational problem. Everything that goes wrong for the leads after the opening heist sequence goes wrong specifically because they are in an environment they cannot read.
The corrective step: When a displacement comedy begins, identify what the displaced characters are competent at, and what the new environment specifically prevents them from applying. In Redirected, the leads are competent at small-scale English crime; they are incompetent at Lithuanian criminal economy, Lithuanian interpersonal codes, and basic rural Lithuanian geography. Tracking that specific incompetence makes the middle act's comic mechanics legible rather than arbitrary.
Step 4: Track the director's location choices as intentional decisions
Location in genre cinema is rarely neutral. Directors working in the crime comedy form make deliberate choices about which environments to place characters in, and those environments carry documentary value independent of the narrative. This is particularly true in European regional cinema, where location signals cultural specificity that international distributors sometimes soften in marketing materials.
Emilis Vėlyvis's use of Vilnius and rural Lithuania across the Zero trilogy and Redirected is consistent: urban Lithuania appears as a functional criminal economy with its own coherent logic, rural Lithuania as an environment that exposes the operational assumptions of anyone who arrives from outside it. For viewers unfamiliar with Lithuanian social geography, the film's location choices carry more information than they may initially appear to — tracking them against what the characters assume about their environment reveals a layer of comic mechanics that doesn't require prior knowledge of Lithuania to appreciate, but rewards it.
Academic film scholarship on European regional cinema — including work in the Journal of Film and Video — consistently notes that international co-productions tend to use location more intentionally than purely domestic productions, precisely because the location choice is itself a production decision requiring justification across multiple financing partners. Redirected's Lithuanian locations are not coincidental.
The corrective step: During the Lithuanian sequences, note what the camera shows of the environment that characters are not reacting to — background detail, architectural context, landscape scale. These choices are deliberate. The film is not just using Lithuania as generic "foreign" backdrop; it is showing a specific Lithuania that Vėlyvis's earlier work establishes as a real operational environment, not an exotic one.
Step 5: Separate the ensemble from the lead — both have their own genre logic
A recurring viewer error in ensemble crime comedies is treating the ensemble as a single unit. The Redirected cast includes both the British leads and several Lithuanian characters who are not serving equivalent narrative functions. The British leads are operating in a crime comedy displacement narrative. The Lithuanian characters — particularly the criminal figures played by Lithuanian actors — are operating in a more straightforwardly crime-genre register drawn from the Zero trilogy's tonal palette. These are different generic registers operating simultaneously in the same film.
This is not a production inconsistency. It is what happens when a co-production brings two national film traditions into contact around a shared narrative. The British actors bring the comedy-inflected register; the Lithuanian cast bring the tonal gravity their domestic genre tradition expects. The friction between those two registers is, in part, the point of the film — and it is most visible in the scenes where the ensembles interact.
The corrective step: In ensemble scenes, watch how different characters react to the same information. The British leads' reactions will be comic-register; the Lithuanian characters' reactions will tend toward the crime-genre register. The tonal gap between those reactions is where Vėlyvis does most of his directorial work. For a wider context on how British actors navigate non-domestic genre expectations, see our editorial on British actors in international productions.
FAQ: Common questions about watching Redirected and similar films
Do I need to know anything about Lithuanian cinema to appreciate Redirected?
No prior knowledge is required, but context helps. The Lithuanian cinema overview on this site covers the key production context. The short version: Lithuanian cinema has its own established crime and thriller genre tradition that Vėlyvis has been working in since 2006, and Redirected is partly in dialogue with that tradition as well as with the British crime comedy form it resembles on the surface.
Where does Redirected fit in the heist comedy genre?
Our detailed heist comedy reference covers this systematically. The short version: Redirected is in the displacement sub-variant of the heist comedy — closer to In Bruges than to Snatch, despite the Vinnie Jones presence suggesting the latter.
Is the tonal inconsistency in the middle act a production problem?
This is one of the most common critical objections to the film. The academic reading, supported by Vėlyvis's consistent approach across the Zero trilogy, is that the tonal shift in the rural Lithuania sequences is deliberate — the comedy deflates as the characters' incompetence stops being funny and starts being genuinely dangerous. Whether that shift is earned is a legitimate critical debate; that it is unintentional is not well-supported by the evidence of Vėlyvis's other work.