Having Botched a French diamond heist through no fault of his own, professional thief Ritchie (Blade’s Stephen Dorff) is given one more chance by his crime boss to square his debt. That chance is stealing a priceless artifact that once belonged to Russian czar Ivan IV, located in the penthouse suite of a high-rise building in Moscow.
That act goes off fine until the hotheaded thug Peter (Jamie Foreman, Layer Cake), one of Ritchie’s Tweedledum/Tweedledee Russian sibling accomplices, needlessly shoots a maid. Worse, the crowded elevator they attempt to make their escape in gets stuck on the 13th floor, unfinished and seemingly abandoned.
That number is not coincidental when one takes in the challenges that await the felons and their hostages. While I leave it to you to discover just what they’re up against, it spoils little to say that the floor is equipped with booby traps that quickly turn a lighthearted crime thriller into a lighthearted gore comedy.
If you can stomach the sight of blood, especially in the name of laughs, Botched offers gruesome and gruesomely funny rewards that verge on outright slapstick. One on hand, you have a urinating rat; on the other hand, you have … well, a chopped-off hand. Everyone — but especially Dorff, who’s a better actor than he gets credit for — plays these modestly budgeted proceedings with an arrow-straight face, which is what makes them work as well as they do. —Rod Lott