Verdict
Summary
Duchess is smoking hot, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Duchess goes for the jugular and revs up the engines to full throttle and never lets up. It’s inferno hot and never cools down. Action fans will raise their flags and watch as Duchess rip-roars a bloody good time.
Plot:
A tough moll upgrades when she’s romanced by a handsome diamond trader.
Review:
While at a nightclub one night with her deadbeat petty criminal boyfriend, Scarlett – a.k.a. Duchess (Charlotte Kirk, fit as a fiddle) locks eyes with a handsome criminal of another sort, the debonair and supremely confidant Robert (Philip Winchester), an American who has an entourage of bodyguards wherever he goes, namely Danny (Sean Pertwee) and Billy (Hoji Fortuna) who are a pair of older blokes who can more than take care of themselves. Robert sweeps Duchess off her feet and makes her his in short order, giving her the grand tour of the good life, which comes with more than a few dangers along the way. He explains to her the fact that he’s in the diamond business as sort of a middleman, but it’s a very lucrative business, but fraught with betrayals, violence, and death. Instead of running the other way, Duchess plants her proverbial daisies in Robert’s garden, and off they go. While at his getaway home in the Canary Islands, Duchess’s world turns upside down when Robert’s business associates turn against him, kill him, and leave her for dead. With nothing but her untempered rage, rough edges, and good looks to build a plan for revenge, she teams up with Robert’s bodyguards to get some good old-fashioned revenge, while also trying to stabilize her untested place in the diamond trade. Duchess is all-in for her own brand of underworld justice!
From genre stalwart filmmaker Neill Marshall, Duchess reteams him with his muse Charlotte Kirk who is quickly establishing herself as a screen presence as an action-oriented sexy starlet in the vein of Milla Jovovich or Kate Beckinsale (or Rhona Mitra if you wanna go there) with her sassy bad attitude, great looks, and overall confidant composure. Kirk really carries this movie as its star, front and center for almost every moment of screen time, and she delivers as much pain and punishment on the guys as is also delivered to her in turn. She gets beat up, tortured, smacked around, but she also pretty convincingly responds in kind. Marshall seems to relish giving his audience the full treatment of tough gals on screen, but he also put them through the ringer in his movies with grueling trials and tribulations … just see The Descent, Doomsday, or his more recent pictures with Kirk such as The Reckoning and The Lair. Duchess is certainly more fun than the sometimes hard-to-watch The Reckoning, and it’s a bit more entertaining and fleshed out than The Lair, and with Kirk as his muse, we’re treated to some eyebrow-raising shots of Kirk’s amazing looking rear-end, which almost gets as much screen time as her face. I mean, what’s to complain about? Duchess is smoking hot, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Duchess goes for the jugular and revs up the engines to full throttle and never lets up. It’s inferno hot and never cools down. Action fans will raise their flags and watch as Duchess rip-roars a bloody good time.
Duchess is on Digital and On-Demand on August 9th from Saban.
