Redirected (2014)

Redirected is a 2014 British-Lithuanian gangster action comedy directed by Emilis Vėlyvis. Three London criminals — John, Tim and Ben — are hired by their boss Karl to rob an illegal poker game and lift a ring belonging to a local heavy known as Golden Pole (Vinnie Jones). Forced to add a fourth body at the last minute, they kidnap their friend Michael, a Buckingham Palace guard. They escape with £1 million in cash, intending to fly to Malaysia. Mid-flight, the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic ash cloud grounds European air travel and reroutes the plane to Vilnius. Stranded in a country none of them understand, with Golden Pole's crew tracking them and the cash already attracting local attention, the film follows their increasingly chaotic attempts to get out of Lithuania alive.

Plot in three acts

The first act stages the heist itself: an illegal London poker game, a target — Golden Pole's ring — that carries personal as much as financial weight, and a four-man crew that is three professionals plus one reluctant draftee. John, Tim and Ben are employed by Karl; Michael is a Buckingham Palace guard kidnapped because the team needs a fourth man at his exact build. The robbery succeeds: £1 million in cash leaves the building, the ring goes with them, and the crew boards a chartered flight for Malaysia. The script wastes no time on procedural detail.

The plane never makes Malaysia. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland — a real event that grounded much of European air travel for weeks — produces an ash cloud that forces every flight in the region down. The plane is redirected to Vilnius. From here the middle act is where the film does most of its work: a road movie through Vilnius and the rural Lithuanian periphery, punctuated by encounters with farmers, smugglers, sex workers, corrupt police, and a sequence of Lithuanian criminals of varying intelligence. The humour comes almost entirely from the visitors' inability to read the social codes around them — and from the case of £1 million attracting more attention with every kilometre.

The final act collapses the chase. Golden Pole's crew arrive in Vilnius. The local Lithuanian operators close in. Staska tortures Ben and Tim. A confrontation outside the city resolves the cash and the ring question — though not in the way any of the parties expected. The ending sequence, in which Michael wakes in a hole as two paramedics throw dirt on him, has become one of the film's most discussed scenes; we treat it in more detail on the ending explained page.

Genre and form

Redirected sits in the broad category of comedy-thriller, but the working description is sharper: it is a heist-comedy ensemble road movie. Each of those terms is doing real work. Heist establishes the inciting event; comedy sets the register; ensemble means the film distributes weight across four leads rather than centring one; and road movie organises the structure as a sequence of episodic encounters during a journey.

The closest English-language reference points are Guy Ritchie's late-1990s ensemble films — Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch — though Redirected is less interested in elaborate plot mechanics than in the specific friction of putting British men into a Lithuanian context. Within that frame the film also nods at older Eastern European traditions of road-movie absurdism: the criminals are the punchline more often than they are the perpetrators.

Themes

The British abroad

Much of the comedy turns on assumptions the four leads carry into a country they cannot place on a map. They assume the language is Russian, the police are corrupt, the money will hold its value, and they themselves are formidable. The film systematically dismantles each assumption. The British abroad genre — a long tradition in English cinema, from Carry On Abroad to In Bruges — usually positions its leads as bewildered. Redirected positions them as bewildered and wrong about being bewildered.

Post-Soviet inheritance

Lithuania in Redirected is not the postcard country of co-production marketing. The script repeatedly grounds the action in spaces that carry post-Soviet visual codes — Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, half-abandoned industrial sites, agrarian backroads — and uses those locations as a comment on European inequality the leads don't notice. The film never lectures about this. It just keeps placing the leads in environments that don't match their expectations.

The mechanics of escape

For a heist film, Redirected is unusually interested in the practical impossibility of disappearing. The cash, once labelled and traced, is a liability. The case it travels in becomes an actor in its own right. The script keeps cutting back to the physical object as it changes hands, gets lost, and reappears — a black-comedy substitute for traditional heist mechanics.

Critical positioning

On release, the film was received warmly in Lithuania and the wider Baltic region, where it was understood as a domestic milestone — a Lithuanian production made on an international scale. The British reception was more mixed. Reviewers acknowledged the ambition but were less convinced by the comic register, and the marketing positioned the film primarily on Vinnie Jones rather than the ensemble or its Lithuanian context. The retrospective view has been kinder: Redirected is now usually discussed as part of the early-2010s wave of Baltic genre cinema that opened the way for later productions.

Where to read next

• Ending explained — the warehouse, the hole, Michael's final beats
• Cast profiles — Vinnie Jones (Golden Pole), Scot Williams (Michael), Gil Darnell (John), Oliver Jackson (Tim), Antony Strachan (Ben), Vytautas Šapranauskas (Priest)
• Emilis Vėlyvis — the director's full filmography
• Production history — how a Lithuanian-British co-production gets made
• Critical reception — box office records, IMDb 6.4, retrospective notes
• External: Wikipedia entry on Redirected (film)
• Editorial: the comedy-thriller genre

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