Vinnie Jones
Vinnie Jones came to acting from professional football, debuted as Big Chris in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), and has spent the subsequent quarter-century working through British genre cinema and the international productions that drew on that brand. Redirected (2014) is part of the second category.
From Wimbledon to the screen
Jones's football career — most prominently as part of Wimbledon's "Crazy Gang" through the late 1980s and early 1990s — gave him a public persona before he had ever appeared on a film set. By the time Guy Ritchie cast him as Big Chris, the persona did most of the casting work: he didn't have to play menace, because the audience arrived already convinced.
What Lock, Stock established, and what every subsequent role has had to negotiate, is that Jones is most effective when the script trusts the audience to read his presence quickly. He doesn't need establishing scenes. He doesn't need backstory. The character arrives as fully formed as a Vinnie Jones character is going to get, and the script then either undermines that, plays it straight, or — most often — does both at once.
The 2000s international turn
Through the 2000s, Jones moved into a steady stream of American and European genre productions. Snatch (2000), Mean Machine (2001, in which he also worked as a kind of unofficial co-producer), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Swordfish (2001), and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) as Juggernaut bracketed the period. He was never the lead but was reliably positioned to deliver one or two scenes of compressed presence per film.
This is the role-shape Redirected drew on. Emilis Vėlyvis needed a British face that European audiences would recognise instantly. Jones provided that — but Vėlyvis used him differently than the Hollywood productions of the same period had. Where the American genre films wanted the Jones brand as part of an ensemble of recognisable types, Vėlyvis cast him as a contained antagonist whose presence carried the threat for the film without needing him on screen continuously.
The Redirected performance: Golden Pole, the antagonist
Crucially, Jones in Redirected is not playing one of the heist crew — he plays Golden Pole, the Lithuanian-side criminal heavy whose ring is the heist's actual prize and who becomes the gang's primary pursuer once the cash leaves London. This is structurally unusual for the Jones brand: the actor is typically positioned with the British protagonist faction, not against them. Vėlyvis cast him on the antagonist side specifically because the persona could carry that flip without explaining itself.
What the script does with Golden Pole is build the threat through reputation before delivering it through screen time. The British crew arrives in Lithuania talking about him before they meet him. The Lithuanian network references him with a specific tonal weight. Jones, when he eventually appears on screen, does not have to explain why he is a problem — the role exists in the negative space the script has built around it. By the third act, the Jones screen presence does the dramatic work that twenty minutes of exposition could not.
The pairing of Jones against the other British leads — Gil Darnell as John, Oliver Jackson as Tim, Antony Strachan as Ben, Scot Williams as Michael — is part of what makes Redirected unusual as a heist comedy. The marquee British face is on the wrong side of the table. The British protagonists are unknowns. The film inverts the audience's expectations about which Britons matter.
After Redirected
Jones has continued working steadily, increasingly in the streaming-era B-tier action and ensemble productions that absorbed the older direct-to-video market. The Gentlemen (2019) and the spin-off television series (2024) brought him back into Guy Ritchie's universe — completing a kind of career-spanning return to the genre that built his on-screen brand. None of the post-Redirected work has had quite the same kind of cultural specificity, however — Vėlyvis was deliberately using Jones to comment on the British abroad, where most subsequent productions just want the brand. Redirected remains, for that reason, one of the more interesting late-career roles in the filmography.