Kevin Jackson, The Independent, 25 October 2001

Patriotism can be an appealing virtue, but it tends to devalue the critical currency, so that whenever a British film is greeted by loyally boosting reviewers as "the best since The Full Monty" or "the best since Four Weddings", or what-have-you, wiser souls will usually read between the lines and stay home with a pizza and Timewatch. It's hard, then, to find quite the right key in which to rant and rave persuasively about a genuinely original, ambitious and wonderfully entertaining new British film - or about the scandal of its sitting lonely and neglected out there, still lacking a distributor, still threatened with the ignominious fate of straight- to-video. And the problem of talking up this film - itself a comedy, of sorts - is made harder by the fact that it is quite unlike anything in the modestly realist manner of Monty or Weddings. Perhaps one could say that Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is one of the best British dramatic comedies since Billy Liar, but that's hardly going to play well with the A-level generation.

Which is a shame, because given a chance they'd probably lap it up as enthusiastically as their elders, if not more so. Five-star sneak previews in yoof-ful movie magazines such as Hot Dog and Uncut have paved the way, and the dance-friendly CD of the original sound track by Luke Haines has been warmly reviewed and is shifting units nicely.

Freely adapted and updated by the director Paul Tickell and his screenwriter Simon Bent from a 1973 short novel by BS Johnson, Britain's best-beloved experimental writer, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is the balefully funny, wilfully amoral story of a slightly nerdish young man (played naif- deadpan by Nick Moran) who - driven by the twin motivations of adolescent rage and the eternal beauties of the double-entry bookkeeping system - decides to wage a one-geek revenge campaign against the rest of the world, starting with mild acts of petty vandalism and escalating to all- out mass murder by means of bombs and poisoned reservoirs.

It was uncomfortable material even in Johnson's day - he died by his own hand just a couple of years after writing the book - and has become all the more so in a world that has grown familiar with vengeful solitaries such as the Unabomber; yet the film, like its source, manages to embrace these horrors in gleefully comic style. (It also, at one level, functions as something of a satire on another phenomenon unknown to Johnson's 1970s: the Loaded lad.) It comes as no surprise to learn that one of the precedents Paul Tickell had in mind for the film was Robert Hamer 's delicious comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Dennis Price systematically murders his way through all the male members of an entire upper-crust family, each of them played by Alec Guinness.

"Kind Hearts and Coronets is probably my favourite British film, because it's such a funny and exhilarating revenge fantasy involving class, and for its amoralism and its wit," Tickell says. He also took a second look at A Clockwork Orange, as well as two more distant inspirations: Bunuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz ("for the impersonal way it presents his wild desires as reality") and - of all things - DW Griffith's Intolerance, with its fluid shuttling between different historical periods.

This needs some explaining. Perhaps the oddest aspect of Christie Malry, and probably the one that has done most to set the distributors running scared, is its hybrid nature: while most of the film is set in present- day west London, and adheres fairly faithfully to BS Johnson's plot, it repeatedly flashes back to a quite separate story set in the Italian Renaissance, and beginning with the invention of the double-entry system by a monk, Fra Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli. The initial licence for this sub-plot was a number of allusions to Pacioli's work in Johnson's text, although it soon took on a life of its own.

"Lots of the book is about fiction-writing, and the question of where fiction-writing ends and reality begins," Tickell says. "I think that's an essential part of the book, and that if you do an adaptation you have to try to capture that spirit in some way. One path you could have gone down was to make it a film about film- making, but I don't like all that sub-Godard stuff where you see the camera and are told that you're in a film...

"So I went down a different path. The Italian Renaissance part, the parallel film or the sub-plot - and you're never quite sure whether it's supposed to be Christie's fantasy - all that was invented to capture those parts of the novel which are about fiction itself, asking questions about reality and what a novel is... Johnson also quotes from Brecht a lot, and what I like about Brecht is that he played with that sort of thing, but in a way that was witty and accessible."

Not everyone will warm to this time-travelling aspect of the film, though all but the most dourly literal-minded will be caught up in its poetry, and most will be impressed by its handsome staging. For admirers, it's one of the elements that make the film so refreshing: Tickell seems effortlessly to have combined the ambition of minority art-house stuff such as Caravaggio with a funny, brutal sense of narrative drive like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and made a film that obviously tickles the Sight and Sound crowd as much as the Hot Dog posse. With a demographic like that, you'd think that ink would be raining down on chequebooks the length of Wardour Street.

Just as bracing is the film's unexpectedly epic feel: on a tiny budget (rumoured to be about pounds 2m, almost all of it raised in Luxembourg and Holland by the producer Kees Kassander), Tickell and company have produced a film which, through cunning sleights of technique, seems to range from siege warfare in Renaissance Milan to "surgical" air strikes on modern Iraq. All shot in wide screen, of course.

Christie Malry is Paul Tickell's second feature; his debut, Crush Proof (aka Hooligans), provoked more bafflement than enthusiasm among critics, who were thrown by its uncommon amalgam of bleak subject matter and poetic style - "It was more Jodorowsky than Ken Loach." He came to directing fairly late, after long detours through postgraduate research (on Rimbaud, Lautreamont and company), rock and style journalism and band management - Kirk Brandon's Spear of Destiny were his boys. He then landed a job as a researcher with LWT and gradually worked his way into arts documentaries, notably Punk and the Pistols for Arena and a report on the Columbine High School massacre - another event with resonances for the reworked Christie Malry.

Tickell's next feature is likely to be another literary adaptation, this time of Robert Irwin's recent novel of dark doings in the mystical Sixties, Satan Wants Me (an accomplished and compelling work, by the way). It sounds promising. In the meantime, let me plead with any openminded or wavering distributors who might chance across this piece to give Christie Malry a chance. Just to make your life easier, I'll offer you a handy screech quote for the adverts, absolutely gratis: "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is the best British film since..." Fill in the rest at your discretion. And the best of British luck.