Redirected (2014)
Redirected drew sharply different responses across the markets it entered. Lithuanian critics treated the film as a domestic landmark — and audiences agreed: the film took $1.8 million at the Lithuanian box office and pulled nearly 300,000 admissions, breaking the country's all-time records at the time. British and continental critics were more divided. The retrospective view has tended to soften the early scepticism.
Numbers
The hard reception data, summarised:
- Production budget: approximately $2.7 million.
- Lithuanian box office: approximately $1.8 million — a record for a domestically-produced film at the time of release.
- Lithuanian admissions: nearly 300,000 by early February 2014, breaking the country's all-time admission record.
- Worldwide box office (broader release): approximately $333,000 (outside Lithuania, primarily UK + selected European markets).
- IMDb rating: 6.4/10 (as of mid-2020s).
- Lithuanian premiere: 10 January 2014.
- UK release: 13 November 2014.
The asymmetric box-office picture — a sizeable hit at home, modest abroad — is itself informative. Within Lithuania, Redirected was a cultural event that exceeded the normal commercial life of a domestic genre film. Outside Lithuania, it was a small distribution title pitched to a niche audience of Vinnie Jones and Baltic-cinema viewers.
The dedication to Vytautas Šapranauskas
The Lithuanian reception cannot be discussed without the context that the film is dedicated to Vytautas Šapranauskas, one of the country's most celebrated comedy and drama actors. Šapranauskas died on 18 April 2013 — ten months before the film's January 2014 premiere. Redirected was his final film. The on-screen dedication, and Šapranauskas's posthumous presence as Priest, added a layer of emotional gravity to the Lithuanian release that no British review of the film registered. Domestic critics writing about the box-office record were also writing, implicitly, about a national farewell to one of the country's beloved performers.
Lithuanian and Baltic reception
For the Lithuanian audience, Redirected arrived as evidence that domestic genre cinema could operate at international scale. Critics writing for outlets like 370.diena.lt and Kinfo.lt treated the film as confirmation of a commercial direction Lithuanian production was capable of taking. The reviews were generally warm — not uncritical, but oriented around what the film represented as much as what it was.
The most thoughtful Lithuanian reviews — the kind that placed Redirected in the longer arc of Baltic cinema — noted that the film's success at home was partly about feeling seen by the outside world. A Lithuanian-directed English-language film starring Vinnie Jones, distributed in the UK, was a different cultural event than a Lithuanian-language film distributed only in the Baltics. The film carried weight beyond its individual merits.
British reception
British critics were less unified. The reviews that engaged seriously with the film recognised what Vėlyvis was doing with the British-abroad genre and gave it credit for not turning the Lithuanian setting into a stage set. Other reviews read the film as a late-cycle Lock, Stock variant — competent but unnecessary — and judged it accordingly.
Two specific patterns recur in the British reviews. First, the Vinnie Jones casting was usually treated as the headline, sometimes to the exclusion of the rest of the ensemble. Reviewers who interrogated the casting noticed that the film was using Jones in a more reactive register than usual; those who didn't tended to evaluate the film by genre default. Second, the Lithuanian half of the production was sometimes flattened into "Eastern European" — a reading the film actively resists but that some critics didn't notice it resisting.
Continental and Eastern European reception
The film travelled across continental Europe in the year following release. Reviews in Russian-language outlets, Polish outlets, and various other regional venues tended to engage more thoroughly with the specifically Eastern European elements — the way the script handled the post-Soviet geography, the language layer, and the cultural codes the British characters can't read. Where the British reviews sometimes missed those layers, the regional reviews started from them.
Retrospective view
A decade on, the film is most usefully discussed as part of the early-2010s wave of Baltic genre productions that opened the way for later, more ambitious Lithuanian and Latvian films. Within that frame, Redirected reads better than it did at release, because the comparison set has shifted. The film is no longer being compared to Lock, Stock and Snatch — it's being placed alongside subsequent Baltic genre work that built on the financing and crew infrastructure Redirected helped establish.
The performances also age well. Vinnie Jones's Golden Pole — local heavy and antagonist, against type for the actor's usual British protagonist register — reads now as one of the more interesting late-career performances in his filmography. Scot Williams's Michael (the kidnapped Buckingham Palace guard), Gil Darnell's John and Oliver Jackson's Tim have each accumulated subsequent work that throws their Redirected performances into clearer relief. Antony Strachan as Ben, working the African-smuggler bar sequence and the Staska torture scene, is one of the film's reliable supporting beats.
Sample notices
Selected outlets that covered the film at release (and remain visible in the linked-archive ecosystem):
- Wikipedia — stable English-language entry at Redirected (film) with full credit block and cast list.
- The Hollywood Reporter — Industry coverage of the Lithuanian box-office record, February 2014.
- 370.diena.lt — Lithuanian news coverage of the production and release.
- Kinfo.lt — Lithuanian cinema news with detailed local-context reviews.
- Laikas.lt — general Lithuanian press coverage during the production phase.
- Indiekino (Germany) — continental review work in the year after release.
- Exler.ru / Exler.es — Russian-language film criticism with retrospective notes.
- Atmovies.com.tw — Taiwanese film database with cast/credit information.
- Film.nu — Swedish film database entry.
- Streamfreak (Netherlands) / Uncut (Belgium) — current streaming-availability guides that maintain entries on the film.