Apnas review – slick British-Asian crime drama mixes family tensions with familiar thrills
A sizeable wedge of this film’s budget was clearly thrown at its opening scenes: they are set at a lavish British-Pakistani wedding, a shiny Lamborghini coiling around the venue like a polished snake. (Helpfully, the voiceover explains that guests have mostly hired their cars for the day to keep up appearances.) Elsewhere, Apnas is flimsy and no-frills, dangling the promise of doing something new with the British crime drama, then ticking off all the genre’s boxes, from shotgun-wielding criminals to gangsters sitting in garages feeding wads of cash into money counters.
James Greaney plays Awais, a wide-eyed British Asian accountant in Manchester who embarks on a thrilling new life as a “washer” in his uncle’s drugs empire, laundering drug money using cryptocurrencies. Except that Awais really does embody the stereotype of a mild-mannered accountant, so it’s his cousin Majid, AKA MK (Asim Ashraf), who is living it large, bumping off rivals and generally making a flashy show of being a drug dealer, to the despair of his father, who hides his crime network behind the facade of being a prominent politician in Pakistan.
In the end, Apnas’s resources don’t quite stretch to meet its ambitions for a sprawling crime epic. It’s got plenty of front and chutzpah, and there is an interesting-ish family drama involving Awais dealing with issues around his identity as a second-generation British Asian. His father, Aslam (Nitin Ganatra) is a taxi driver with high expectations for his kids: Awais to be financially successful, a good marriage for his sister. Her journalling gives the film its voiceover – but it’s a weak link, partly because her character is thinner than the paper of the pages on which she writes her diary.
