This delirious crime caper follows the story of Dorothy and Petula, two women drawn together by chance, on the run by choice, and carrying a million quid. With a corrupt copper after their cash and some Glasgow gangsters after their heads and their cash, these beautiful creatures aren't a couple of women out for a Babycham. Blackmail, murder, deception, betrayal and a suitcase stashed with cash, with the whack of an iron-scaffolding pipe their story begins.
Firmly in the spirit of the late 90s wave of British crime films, Beautiful Creatures stars Rachel Weisz and Susan Lynch as two young Glasgow women united against their brutally abusive boyfriends. With a corpse in the bathroom, a golf bag with a secret and seedy detective on their trail Dorothy (Lynch) and Petula (Weisz) hatch an ill-conceived fake kidnapping as their passport from an impossible situation. The film is an entertaining 84 minutes, but though there are several suspense scenes and some queasily amusing black comedy the TV style direction and generic plot fail to deliver any originality. First time feature director Bill Eagles concentrates on winning strong performances from an excellent cast and referencing The Wizard of Oz (1939) (Dorothy has a dog called Pluto, rather than Toto), Wild at Heart (2000) (watch Pluto and those fingers). Added to these are references to Thelma and Louise (1991), Shallow Grave (1994), Butterfly Kiss (1995), Bound (1996), and the film its title echoes, Heavenly Creatures (1994). Considering the graphic violence against women this would have been a stronger, more honest film had it taken itself seriously. As it is, the fashionable yet often inappropriate humour prevents Beautiful Creatures making any serious point about women's reaction to male violence, the finale degenerating into routine feel-good exploitation.
On the DVD: This is a bare-bones release with brief on-screen production notes, cast and crew credits, a page about Universal's DVD email newsletter and a static menu. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound locks most of the audio to the centre speaker, though there's plenty of dog-barking all around the room. The anamorphically enhanced 1.77-1 transfer clearly cuts off part of the original image at both sides of the screen and is often, especially in the many night scenes, far grainier than one would expect from a feature film released in the year 2000. --Gary S Dalkin