As a movie, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is a like a car that's driver has put the gas pedal to the floor without taking off the parking brake: its engine is constantly revving, but the vehicle never moves.

For the first third of the movie, this is somewhat acceptable. That half hour serves as exposition. Christie Malry (Nick Moran, Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels) is a mousy young Brit who works in a bank. His stated goals in life are to make a lot of money and have a lot of women; his admitted obstacle is that he knows nothing about either. On the encouragement of his friend who is in a rock band and thus knows about such things, Christie takes an accounting class and learns that for each expense (debit) there must be something garnered in return (credit). This is the double entry method of accounting, where each transaction receives two notations in the ledger. When his ailing mother finally passes on, Christie realizes that this kind of notation can be applied to life. For every aggravation perpetrated on him, he will retaliate against the unsuspecting British populace in some way, even assigning the credit a dollar value.

At this point, I assumed that Christie Malry's Own Double Entry would get down to business. Christie starts out by keying the car of someone who ran him off the street, and with each successive act of vengeance, he escalates the severity of his response. He hits back at his job, the tax bureau, and onward and upward until society as a whole becomes his target. Only, Christie's violent acts are presented with the same vigor (or lack thereof) as his more tepid pranks. Upping his boss' order of carbon paper from 5 cartons to the ludicrous 50 tons is given as much weight as planting a bomb in someone's pipes. Christie's demeanor remains relatively the same, even as he gathers this imaginary money and also gets a girlfriend, the sweet yet kinky Carol (Kate Ashfield, Shaun of the Dead). He achieves his goals, but the movie is wearing false teeth, and so it gums its satirical subject all the way through rather than attacking it with any real bite.

Paul Tickell, who has previously directed television and a feature called Crush Proof, is an extremely capable director. Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is edited in a quasi-music video style, as events are sliced up, jumbled, and spliced back together, moving forward and backward at the same time. Laced with an excellent, menacing score by Luke Haines of the bands the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, he lays a foundation of surface style. The rhythm remains constant, which means there is no up and down, no ebb and flow. We never get to know Christie, much less the people around him. The film consistently keeps its characters and its audience at arm's length. This makes Christie a petty schlub rather than a black avenger. Why root for him when he barely roots for himself?

This back and forth style is particularly ineffective when it comes to the climax. We are hipped to Christie Malry's final entry several minutes before we are made to understand why, and when that explanation comes, it's less of a why than a "Who cares?" On the same level, there is a parallel story that runs through the whole of Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. Tickell and screenwriter Simon Bent (adapting a novel by B.S. Johnson) regularly interrupt Christie's story to take us back to Renaissance Italy to see the plight of Pacioli (Marcello Mazzarella), the inventor of double entry accounting. He and his friend Leonardo Da Vinci (Mattia Sbragia, Ocean's Twelve) are having a little trouble staying out from under the thumb of the invading French. It was never quite clear how their situation was meant to comment on Christie Malry's. They capitulate to the powers that be while he fights back. Together they create a narrative double entry that never balances out.

THE DVD

Video:
Christie Malry's Own Double Entry was shot in full frame and was put on DVD at a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The colors really pop, especially in scenes where Tickell uses intentionally fake-looking special effects to create an aura of unreality. No complaints on this front.

Sound:
The sound is done in Dolby digital. Again, very clear, no complaints. My initial interest in this film was due to Luke Haines' music (I've had the album since it was released in 2001; this film has taken that long to reach DVD), and the mixers definitely cranked the levels when the score takes off. I give that a definite thumbs up--though, I recommend tracking down the CD instead, get the tunes without the dialogue. (Other Britpop aficionados out there might take some amusement in the joke in Christie's accounting ledger near the end of the film. On the debit side, he writes "Oasis," and on the other side, notes that hundreds of Londoners died. One suspects Paul Tickell is not a fan of the Gallagher brothers.)

Extras:
Merely a trailer for Christie Malry's Own Double Entry.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Skip It. Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is a fairly empty experience. There is a lot of flash, but not a lot of substance. It's a film that never gets off the ground. Instead, the director settles for finding the picture's rhythm and then sticking to it. It may be a steady beat, but I couldn't muster up anything more than apathy for it.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joelle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent projects include the futuristic romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks, a loopy crime tale drawn by Dan Christensen; and the horror miniseries Madame Frankenstein, a collaboration with Megan Levens. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.