Redirected — Full Plot Summary
A detailed plot summary of Redirected (2014), the 2014 Lithuanian-British gangster comedy directed by Emilis Vėlyvis. This page covers the full plot through the middle of the third act. For the spoiler-heavy ending walkthrough, see the ending explained page. For a spoiler-free overview, see the main film page.
Act One — The London heist
The setup
The film opens in London. Three career criminals — John (Gil Darnell), Tim (Oliver Jackson), and Ben (Antony Strachan) — are employed by their boss Karl to rob an illegal poker game. The job has two targets. The first is approximately £1 million in cash circulating through the room. The second, and arguably more important, is a ring belonging to a local heavy known as Golden Pole (Vinnie Jones). The ring is personal property of Golden Pole's that Karl wants for reasons the script leaves partially obscured but that the film implies are about power and reputation rather than money.
The kidnapping
The plan requires a fourth body of a specific build — the heist's mechanics depend on someone of a particular size being able to pass for a particular role at the casino. None of the three regulars fits the build. The crew solves this by kidnapping their friend Michael (Scot Williams), a Buckingham Palace guard who happens to have the right physical profile. Michael is brought into the operation under duress, kept partially uninformed about the wider plot, and treated by his abductors as a friend with a temporary inconvenience rather than as a hostage.
The robbery
The robbery itself succeeds. The film does not dwell on procedural detail. The cash and the ring leave the casino with the crew. The audience registers the heist as a competent operation by a working crew, with Michael as the visibly uncomfortable fourth body who didn't sign up for this. By the end of the first act, the four are on a chartered flight bound for Malaysia.
The volcano — the first-act turn
Mid-flight, the script invokes a real-world event. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland — which had actually grounded most of European air travel for several weeks in April 2010 — produces an ash cloud across the relevant airspace. Every commercial flight in the region is grounded. The chartered plane carrying the crew is rerouted to the nearest viable airport, which the script places in Vilnius, Lithuania. The crew arrives in a country none of them can place on a map, with £1 million in cash, the stolen ring, and no plan that survives contact with Lithuanian customs.
For detailed treatment of how the volcano plot device works, see the Eyjafjallajökull twist page. For the broader genre context — how the eruption became a cinematic plot device in multiple films — see our editorial on films that used Eyjafjallajökull.
Act Two — Vilnius and central Lithuania
The airport
The case carrying the £1 million arrives at Vilnius airport with the crew. The case attracts the immediate attention of a Lithuanian small-time operator who happens to be at the airport when the rerouted flight lands. From this opening turn, the local Lithuanian criminal network begins to track the British leads' movements. The crew does not yet realise this.
The road begins
The middle act is structured as a road movie through Vilnius and central Lithuania. The crew, attempting to get out of the country, travels by various means — taxis, a rented vehicle, eventually a van — through Vilnius's residential outskirts, the surrounding agrarian periphery, and the small towns connecting the two. Each location produces an encounter. Farmers, smugglers, sex workers, corrupt local police, black-market figures of varying intelligence — the script structures the middle act as a sequence of episodic meetings rather than as a single plot mechanism.
The petrol station
One of the middle act's anchor sequences takes place at a rural Lithuanian petrol station. Michael, the least criminal of the four, is forced to handle a transaction in a language he does not speak with a station owner who reads his confusion as something other than what it is. The scene is structured around Michael's eyes — Williams plays the entire sequence with minimal dialogue, letting the camera track what his face is doing as he tries to read the social situation he has been dropped into.
The bar brawl
Ben (Antony Strachan) carries the African-smuggler bar-brawl sequence — a middle-act setpiece where the crew enters a peripheral Lithuanian town's bar to gather information, the situation deteriorates as Ben's social register fails to translate, and what was supposed to be a routine errand becomes a physical confrontation that pulls in multiple parties. The brawl is one of the film's biggest action setpieces and one of its most efficient — the script uses the scene to escalate the danger without requiring exposition.
The corrupt police
John (Gil Darnell) handles most of the language-gap comic beats with the corrupt Lithuanian police force the crew encounters. The rural police station sequence — where John spends almost two minutes constructing a story for an officer who doesn't speak English — is one of the film's most discussed comic setpieces. The officer's indifference to John's rhetorical strategies is the joke. The shot stays on Darnell. He keeps going. The bit works because of his unwillingness to break.
Staska
The local heavy Staska (Andrius Žiurauskas) becomes the middle act's antagonist on the Lithuanian side. The crew has, by this point, attracted enough local attention that the criminal network is closing in. Staska captures Ben and Tim and tortures them for information about the cash and the ring. The torture sequence is one of the film's most uncomfortable — Vėlyvis lets the scene sit on the line between black comedy and outright thriller. Strachan plays Ben absorbing the costs with restrained physicality. Jackson plays Tim differently: where Strachan's Ben treats the torture as a professional hazard, Jackson's Tim treats it as evidence about something he had not allowed himself to think clearly about before.
The Šapranauskas presence
Throughout the middle act, the Lithuanian network is anchored by Priest, played by Vytautas Šapranauskas. The character occupies less screen time than the British leads, but the script gives him moments where his Lithuanian-language work and theatrical presence carry the scene's weight. For the Lithuanian audience watching the film's January 2014 premiere — ten months after Šapranauskas's death — these sequences carried a layer of meaning the rest of the world's viewers could not register.
Act Three — Golden Pole arrives
The pursuit reaches Lithuania
By the start of the third act, Golden Pole (Vinnie Jones) has tracked the cash and the ring to Lithuania. His crew arrives in Vilnius. The pursuit moves from the local Lithuanian network — which had been the middle act's threat — to the British-side antagonist who originally lost the ring in the London heist. The film's two pursuing factions converge on the crew from different directions.
The warehouse
The third act stages its confrontation at a derelict industrial site on the outskirts of Vilnius. The location is one of the film's specific Lithuanian settings — a real abandoned mid-century factory in the Vilnius region — and Vėlyvis shoots it for its post-Soviet visual texture as much as for its narrative function. Golden Pole's crew, the local Lithuanian network, the surviving members of the heist crew, and the cash all converge.
Without spoilers
The closing sequences of the third act — including the warehouse confrontation's resolution, John's fate, and the specific events of the ending — are covered in detail on the ending explained page. This summary stops here to preserve the closing reveals for readers who have not yet seen the film. What we will note is that the ending is deliberately ambiguous and that the film's reputation among viewers who have engaged with it carefully rests partly on the script's refusal to deliver a clean resolution.
What the plot is really about
Strip the heist mechanics away and Redirected is a film about four men who think they understand how the world works, getting placed in a country whose internal logic they cannot read. The heist is the trigger. The Eyjafjallajökull diversion is the relocation device. The actual subject is the gap between the British leads' assumptions and the reality of the Lithuanian space they have to negotiate.
This is the thematic line that connects Redirected to In Bruges, to Carry On Abroad, to the British-abroad tradition more broadly. Where Redirected differs is in the specificity of the Lithuanian setting. The country is not interchangeable with another Eastern European location. The script knows Vilnius and the surrounding agrarian region in ways the leads do not, and the comedy operates in the gap between the two perspectives.