D: Paul Tanter / 82m

Cast: Tom Benedict Knight, Simon Phillips, Christina Bellavia, Ewan Ross, Zara Phythian, Ben Loyd-Holmes, Kye Loren, Lorraine Stanley

A ruthless gang of terrorists led by Holt (Phillips) kidnap the British Prime Minister’s daughter, Alice (Bellavia) and some of her friends from a nightclub. At a nearby multi-storey car park they barricade themselves in and wait for the authorities to find them. When they do, the officer in charge, Detective Carpenter (Ross) advises caution but an SAS unit led by Christopher Lowe (Knight) goes in without orders. They find each level rigged with explosives. Meanwhile, Holt waits for his larger plan to come to fruition, and when he becomes aware of the SAS, exhorts his gang to kill them. A cat and mouse game ensues as the SAS make their way through each level, while on the outside Carpenter tries to figure out how the gang can possibly make their escape, or if they really are intending to blow up the car park and themselves with it.

With so many independent, low budget gangster/crime movies having been made in the UK over the last ten years – often by the same people – you could be forgiven for thinking that with all that experience the movies would get better over time. But you’d be wrong. And He Who Dares is a perfect example of a genre that has nothing left to say, and even less to offer in terms of entertainment. It’s a grim, depressing movie that ranks as amateurish drivel; its below-par heroics and poorly choreographed action scenes are so bad that it makes even Steven Seagal’s run of Made-in-Romania movies look good.

There’s really no excuse for the appalling dialogue, the ridiculous and unconvincing set up, the woeful plotting, the atrocious acting, the clumsy direction, the lacklustre photography, the unimaginative fight scenes, and worst of all, the over-indulgent use of freeze frames, superimpositions and distressed image effects that passes for editing. Put all these things together and you have an appalling mess of a movie that seemingly has no idea of how stupid it is.

We have Phillips to thank for the risible story, and director Tanter, along with James Crow, to thank for the terrible dialogue and plotting. Tanter and Phillips are frequent collaborators – the White Collar Hooligan movies, Shame the Devil (2013) – and really should be kept apart from each other if this is the kind of movie they’re likely to come up with. What defeats the imagination is the possibility that these two men, with all their (limited) experience, can’t see that the movies they’re producing are so bad as to be almost unendurable. It’s worrying that movie after movie goes by and there’s no improvement in quality.

Rating: 1/10 – with nothing to recommend it, He Who Dares is an embarrassing, unintentionally hilarious movie that exposes the limitations of its makers, and would have gained more kudos if it had been a student movie; with a sequel – He Who Dares: Downing Street Siege – already completed (and which sees Knight, Phillips and Bellavia reprising their roles), it seems there’s no likelihood of things improving any time soon.