Samuel L Jackson and Eva Green Punch Up Switchback Crime Caper

Samuel L Jackson wears his worst hairdo since Jackie Brown in Just Play Dead – a grey, crimped ponytail with an undercut – and it is far from the film's only indulgence. Martin Campbell's overworked crime caper asks its two leads to distract viewers from sub-par Tarantinoesque flourishes, confusing plot points and tired stereotypes. Jackson and Eva Green, the Guardian's review argues, just about manage it.

Campbell, 82, belongs to the post-retirement director's club that includes Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Since 2020 he has shot five films. Jackson, described in the review as "a mere 77" by comparison, is on positively cuddly form by his standards here – the hairdo notwithstanding.

The plot runs on switchbacks. Jackson plays Jack Wolfe, a kingpin who has interrupted his retirement on a Spanish-speaking Caribbean island with the odd poisoning, as seen in the film's introduction. Wolfe is getting antsy. Afraid the law is close behind him, he hatches a scheme with his philandering wife Nora (Eva Green): she will help him frame her surfer lover Chad (Jason Fernández) for his supposed murder, and the couple will split the big-bucks insurance payout.

Wolfe covers his back. Aware that Nora might do him in for real, he records her saying as much.

She conspires anyway. Nora ropes Chad into her own murder plot, planning to let him take the fall. Or perhaps her detective bit on the side, Dani (Eoin Macken), will get there first.

The Guardian's review locates the film's pleasures squarely in its performers. Jackson's cuddly menace and Green's manipulative energy give the material more voltage than its familiar double- and triple-cross mechanics strictly earn. Rounding out the principal cast are Fernández as the surfer pawn and Macken as the crooked detective in Nora's orbit.

For Campbell, whose recent output has been prolific if uneven, the film continues a late-career pattern: steady production, genre fixtures, star packaging. For Jackson, it is another entry in a run of roles that trade on his persona rather than stretch it – here, softened but still unmistakably his.

Whether Just Play Dead finds an audience beyond its stars' devotees will depend on tolerance for a plot that, by the review's account, ties itself in knots along the way.