Twist is a Dickensian disaster – what did Michael Caine do to deserve this?

• Dir: Martin Owen. Cast: Raff Law, Michael Caine, Rita Ora, Lena Headey, Noel Clarke, Sophie Simnett, Franz Drameh, David Walliams, Jason Maza. 12 cert, 88 mins

Oliver Twist, but the twist is… parkour. It sounds like an idea someone once had, or dreamed, or hallucinated while high. Imagine: Charles Dickens’s scrappy orphan free-running across London’s rooftops. Hopping the alleyways. Shimmying down drainpipes. What a sparky title sequence that might yield. Then?

Maybe Oliver – no, let’s call him Twist, and fast-forward to early adulthood – has graffiti skills that would make Banksy blush. He paints large-scale murals inspired by Blake on the side of City skyscrapers, and no one even minds. Let’s have him fall in with the usual posse of ruffians, except here they’re warehouse-dwelling art hipsters who hack mobile phones using what looks like Windows 95, while also filling their incredibly lame hideaway with mannequins and stolen neon.

If this truly were the 1990s, Michael Caine as Fagin would be a coup. Shooting in 2019, your preferred choice for the Artful Dodger – sorry, “Dodge” – is Rita Ora, which feels like less of a coup. Still, equal-opportunity casting shouldn’t stop there. It’s a perfect chance to ring some contemporary changes. Why shouldn’t that brute Bill Sikes be a fuming lesbian? Lena Headey is available to scowl through her fringe – job done.

Then no one woke up. A Twist doesn’t get through development so much as fail to be nipped in the bud a thousand times. Without intent, it precisely, almost perfectly, resembles a post-Lock, Stock British gangster flick from 1999, one of the slew of Lottery-funded eyesores which made every critic bear a permanent grudge against Guy Ritchie.

At any moment, there’s a danger Eddie Izzard might show up in a dressing gown. But why fantasise? “Oh my giddy aunt, what is happening with your barnet?” is actual dialogue. So is a security van driver asking “What’s occurring?” A street chase kicks off to the yowling strains of Cast’s “Alright”, a contender for the most charity-shopped Britpop single of its day.

Dickens, to be fair, is blameless. Nothing in Twist’s plot constitutes an extensive borrowing from his novel. It just nabs a few names, shuffles the characters about, and shows its hand as a Thomas Crown-esque art caper with a light sprinkling of library references (an auction house called “Dotheboy’s”, named after the school in Nicholas Nickleby). Noel Clarke is a gruff cop, David Walliams is terrible as a snooty art dealer, and yes, that would appear to be Keith Lemon handing out traffic tickets as “Warden Bumble”.

London looks so eerily empty throughout, it’s hard to believe the shoot pre-dated lockdown. Just as you’re having this thought, there’s a bit where a whole fleet of Deliveroo bikes wobble up to thwart Clarke (“But I didn’t order anything!”) which is considerably funnier than it realises, in that way of anything-goes farce gone wrong.

No one has any idea what they’re doing, but everyone has wide-boy cockiness to spare. In the general spirit of faking it till you make it, a then-22-year-old Raff Law (son of Jude) hits his marks as Twist and looks ready at all times for a director to arrive. Without a doubt, he’s playing a homeless free-running graffitist who wees off rooftops. But actor-turned-helmer Martin Owen doesn’t seem to have supplied many other notes. Maybe one: Nancy, aka “Red” (Sophie Simnett), is a bisexual biker whom our boy awkwardly mistakes for a man – very confusing, all that.

I don’t know where to begin with Rita Ora’s costumes, but her reactions in the thick of breathless pursuit are quite something. “Relax man, the cops packed it in way back” is the first thing we hear her say. “He left the Old Bill for dust” comes later. One minute she’s in a flappy leather aviator hat, then it’s a tidy winter coat and triangular shades – they’ve thought through a specific look for each time she overacts running around a corner. You could throw her clothes in one big pile and call it an Urban Outfitters sample sale.

Once upon a time, Caine as Fagin might have been a force – something to build a film around. But the poor man’s 87 and recovering from a broken ankle. He is rheumy and seated while everything’s going on, emanates an aura of dismay, and you at least hope he got decently fed, and reassured by someone that this wouldn’t be his swansong. For one brief section, as some kind of comedy Russian with a stick-on ’tache, they hoist him to his feet, but he has to be arduously wheelchaired through the auction scenes, then placed on a doorstep.

It’s not just Caine who runs out of energy – there are would-be climactic roof sprints which resort to astonishingly ropey outtakes, with Law and co helping each other gingerly around sections of chimney. I would pay a lot for the giddy joy of watching these scenes at a parkour convention. I would also be prepared to bestow a whole extra star if someone said, “Seriously guv, you are twisting my melon,” just once. A minor missed opportunity, in an otherwise perfect shambles.

On Sky Cinema now