Redirected (2014): The Complete Guide

At a glance

• Title: Redirected
• Year: 2014
• Director: Emilis Vėlyvis
• Country: Lithuania · United Kingdom (co-production)
• Language: English, Lithuanian, Russian
• Runtime: 99 minutes
• Genre: Gangster action comedy / heist-comedy road movie
• Lithuanian premiere: 10 January 2014
• UK release: 13 November 2014
• Budget: approximately $2.7 million
• Lithuanian box office: approximately $1.8 million (all-time domestic record)
• Lithuanian admissions: approximately 300,000 (all-time record at release)
• Worldwide box office (outside Lithuania): approximately $333,000
• IMDb rating: 6.4/10
• Dedicated to: Vytautas Šapranauskas (1958–2013), the film's final-role performer

The plot in full

Redirected opens in London with an illegal poker game. The target is twofold: approximately £1 million in cash circulating through the room, and a ring belonging to a local criminal known as Golden Pole (Vinnie Jones). Three professional crooks — John, Tim and Ben — have been hired by their boss Karl to execute the robbery. At the last moment the crew needs a fourth body of a specific size, and they kidnap their friend Michael, a Buckingham Palace guard whose stature is right for what they have planned.

The robbery succeeds. The crew leaves London with the money, the ring, and a kidnapped fourth man. The escape plan is a charter flight to Malaysia, but Malaysia never happens. The plane, mid-flight, is grounded along with most of European air travel by the ash cloud from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland — a real event the screenplay uses as the plot's redirection device. Every flight in the region comes down. The crew's plane is rerouted to Vilnius.

The Vilnius middle act is where the film does most of its actual work. The case carrying £1 million arrives at the airport with the crew. The case attracts the immediate attention of local Lithuanian small-time operators. From this opening turn, the script structures the middle act as a road movie through Vilnius and central Lithuania — encounters with farmers, smugglers, sex workers, corrupt local police, and a sequence of Lithuanian criminals of varying intelligence. The comedy depends on the British leads' inability to read the social codes around them, and the case of cash attracts more attention with every kilometre.

The third act collapses the chase. Golden Pole's crew arrives from London to pursue the gang and recover the ring. The local Lithuanian operators close in from another angle. Staska tortures Ben and Tim for information. Sequences of escalating violence and absurdity culminate in a confrontation outside the city. The ending — Michael waking in a hole as paramedics shovel dirt onto him, then forcing his way back to a corrupt police officer's house, then captured a second time, then shots fired offscreen — has become the film's most-discussed sequence. We treat it spoiler-heavily on the ending explained page; the spoiler-free synopsis remains on the film page.

Cast & director

The principal cast

• Vinnie Jones as Golden Pole — the local heavy whose ring is the heist's actual prize, and who becomes the pursuing antagonist once the cash leaves the country.
• Scot Williams as Michael — the kidnapped Buckingham Palace guard added as the crew's reluctant fourth man.
• Gil Darnell as John — the talker; carries the bulk of the language-gap comic beats.
• Oliver Jackson as Tim — the wildcard; the script reserves the third-act reveal for his arc.
• Antony Strachan as Ben — carries the African-smuggler bar-brawl sequence and the Staska torture beats.
• Vytautas Šapranauskas as Priest — Lithuanian figure in the criminal network; the film was Šapranauskas's final role.
• Aurimas Meliešius as Vycka — local Lithuanian operator the British leads encounter in the middle act.
• Andrius Žiurauskas as Staska — the local heavy who tortures Ben and Tim in the third act.
• Mindaugas Papinigis — Lithuanian supporting cast.
• Artur Smolianinov — Russian actor; widens the linguistic frame from Lithuanian-only.

The director

Emilis Vėlyvis is a Lithuanian writer-director whose previous features — Zero. Lilac Lithuania (2006) and Zero 2 (2010) — had established him as one of the country's most reliable commercial-genre filmmakers before Redirected. Redirected was his English-language debut. After Redirected he completed the Zero trilogy with Zero 3 (2017) and directed The Generation of Evil (2021). For full filmography and style notes see the director profile.

A note on a recurring misattribution

Vėlyvis did NOT direct Tadas Blinda. The Beginning (2011). That film — a major Lithuanian commercial hit of the same general period — was directed by Donatas Ulvydas. Casual coverage occasionally conflates the two filmographies. They are separate.

Production & financing

Redirected was made as a Lithuanian-British co-production with creative leadership and post-production based in Lithuania. The budget was reported at approximately $2.7 million — substantial for a Lithuanian production at the time but modest by British or American standards. Most of the visible production value comes from location work rather than set construction or VFX.

The financing stack combined Lithuanian tax-incentive funding (the country had introduced its film tax credit scheme in 2014 — see our deep-dive on the Lithuanian tax incentive), pre-sales to British and continental European distributors, and post-production services based in Vilnius. London sequences were shot first (opening casino, airport beats), with the bulk of the shoot subsequently moving to Vilnius and central Lithuania.

The score was composed for the production by Lithuanian composers Domas Strupinskas and Paulius Kilbauskas rather than tracked from existing material. This gave the film a coherent sonic identity through the geographic shifts and tuned the score for the road-movie pacing. The film's sound design also makes substantial use of ambient Lithuanian-language radio and television in the background of scenes — both for verisimilitude and for the running joke that the British leads cannot understand any of it.

For a fuller breakdown including the on-set language-management arrangement and the locations used in Vilnius and central Lithuania, see the production history.

The Eyjafjallajökull plot device

The flight diversion that sends the gang to Vilnius is built on a real event. In April 2010, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted, producing an ash cloud that disrupted European air travel between March and May. At the eruption's peak, much of European airspace was closed. Millions of passengers were stranded. Several airlines and cargo carriers spent weeks rerouting around the affected zones.

The Redirected screenplay uses this real-world disruption as its narrative reset button. Without the ash cloud, the heist would have followed the British template: London robbery, escape, Malaysia, possible sequel set on a beach. With the ash cloud, the film becomes the Lithuanian-set culture-clash road movie it is — a deliberate choice that turns the entire visual and tonal axis ninety degrees from where a conventional Lock, Stock-tradition heist film would have gone.

It is one of the more elegant uses of real-world contingency as plot machinery in 2010s commercial cinema. The 2013 French comedy Eyjafjallajökull uses the same eruption as its plot device, with a similar comic register but a different narrative shape. Both films found the eruption simply too useful to ignore: an event large enough to feel inevitable, small enough to feel personal, and recent enough to read for the audience without exposition.

Box office: a Lithuanian record

Redirected was a commercial event in Lithuania at a scale Lithuanian films did not normally reach. The numbers, as reported in February 2014 by The Hollywood Reporter and other industry outlets:

• $1.8 million in Lithuanian box office in the first weeks of theatrical release.
• Nearly 300,000 admissions in the same window — breaking the country's all-time record for a domestic-produced film at that point.
• Approximately 1 in 10 Lithuanians had seen the film theatrically by early February 2014.
• The film became, as of January 2015 according to Lithuanian newspaper Kauno Diena, the most-watched film in Lithuanian history.

The international box office was substantially smaller — approximately $333,000 across the UK and continental European releases combined. This is itself informative: Redirected was a domestic phenomenon at the Lithuanian level, a niche genre title at the international level, and the asymmetric pattern explains why the film travels better in conversation among film-history specialists than among general cinephiles.

Critical reception & IMDb 6.4

The film carries an IMDb rating of 6.4/10 (as of the mid-2020s), aggregated from user ratings rather than critic scores. The Rotten Tomatoes critical score has been more mixed, reflecting the broader pattern of British reviewers being unconvinced by the comic register while Lithuanian and continental European reviewers engaged more thoroughly with the cultural specificity.

Selected outlets that covered the film at release include Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd, JustWatch, The Hollywood Reporter (specifically on the box-office record), 370.diena.lt, Kinfo.lt, Laikas.lt, Indiekino (Germany), Exler.ru/Exler.es (Russian-language criticism), Atmovies.com.tw (Taiwan), Film.nu (Sweden), Uncut (Belgium), Streamfreak (Netherlands), Roobla, and Time Out London.

For a fuller treatment of the critical reception including British, Lithuanian and continental responses, see our reviews page. The retrospective view has been kinder to the film than the 2014 view was, as Vėlyvis's subsequent work and the broader Baltic-cinema renaissance have shifted the comparison set.

Dedication to Vytautas Šapranauskas

The single most important cultural fact about Redirected, for the Lithuanian audience, is that it was Vytautas Šapranauskas's final film. Šapranauskas was one of Lithuania's most celebrated comedy and drama actors. He died on 18 April 2013 — one day before his 55th birthday — almost ten months before the film's January 2014 premiere. The production carries an on-screen dedication to him.

For the Lithuanian audience filling cinemas in January 2014, every scene featuring Šapranauskas as Priest carried a layer of meaning the film could not have anticipated when shooting. The country was still in active mourning for one of its most beloved performers. The box-office record described above was made by an audience attending what was effectively a posthumous performance — and a national farewell.

British and continental reviewers rarely registered this layer, which partly explains the asymmetry in critical reception. The same film, read without knowledge of the dedication, registers as a competent Lock, Stock-tradition heist comedy with cross-cultural friction. Read with knowledge of the dedication, it registers as something more elegiac.

Themes and genre

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 tradition — Carry On Abroad, In Bruges, Sexy Beast — 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 mechanics of escape

For a heist film, Redirected is unusually interested in the practical impossibility of disappearing. The cash and the ring keep changing hands as the script's actual subject; the chase mechanics are a black-comedy substitute for traditional heist payoff.

Genre positioning

The working description is heist-comedy ensemble road movie. The closest English-language reference points are Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Snatch — though Redirected is less interested in elaborate plot mechanics than in the friction of putting British men into a Lithuanian context. For the broader genre context see our editorial on heist comedies as a reference category and on why the comedy-thriller doesn't travel easily.

Where to watch in 2026

The film has, at various points, been available on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV (rental/purchase), Fandango at Home, Rakuten TV, Disney+ (selected territories), Pathé Thuis (Netherlands), BE TV GO (Belgium), VRT, and other regional European platforms. Specific availability changes regularly by region.

For up-to-date streaming and rental availability, see our home release page. Third-party guides that track current platform listings reliably: JustWatch, Uncut (Belgium), and Streamfreak (Netherlands).

Place in Lithuanian cinema

Redirected belongs to the early-2010s wave of Baltic genre productions that demonstrated regional industries could operate at international scale. The Lithuanian film industry had three lives in the seventy years before Redirected: the Soviet-era state-studio system (1940s–1990), the post-independence collapse (1990s into the 2000s), and the tax-incentive era (2010s onward). Redirected sits at the start of the third phase and is often cited as one of its defining productions.

For broader context: see our Lithuanian cinema guide, our industry primer on the LFS-to-tax-incentive arc, our deep-dive on the 30% tax credit that powered productions like Chernobyl and Stranger Things-era Netflix work, and our editorial on Baltic cinema's 2010s renaissance.

Continue reading

• Spoiler-free synopsis and themes
• Ending explained — the hole, the ring, the gunshots
• Full cast page
• Vytautas Šapranauskas tribute
• Director profile
• The Zero trilogy filmography
• Production history
• Critical reception & box office
• Where to watch
• Trivia and production notes
• External authority: Wikipedia entry on Redirected (film)

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