Pimp (2010)

Critic Reviews

• , This is London

  Everything about this supposedly raw exposé feels like yesterday's news.

• Allan Hunter, Daily Express

  Tight close-ups and direct-to- camera confessionals are the order of the day in a film so peppered with sleazy sex, casual violence and endless swearing that it comes perilously close to caricature. Nobody's finest hour.

• Anthony Quinn, Independent

  The plot, concerning the identity of a snuff-movie killer, is a gruesome mixture of sexual sadism and sentimentality, made even less palatable by dialogue of quarter-witted aggression.

• Antonia Quirke, Financial Times

  Awful -- bad acting, the worst kind of cockney clichés.

• Trevor Johnston, Radio Times

  The sight of Dyer operating under the delusion he's channelling Al Pacino is grim enough, but the real blame must be laid at the door of director/star/co-writer Cavanah, who seriously underperforms in all three roles.

• Ellen E Jones, Total Film

  You wouldn't think a film could actually be both very boring and very offensive. Pimp is that paradox made flesh

• Tim Evans, Sky Movies

  For a film that limply purports to lift the lid on the sordid world of Soho sex trafficking this dismal offering is chock full of rank misogyny.

• Paul Fairclough, Little White Lies

  Both breathtakingly crass and unintentionally funny without ever being engaging or entertaining.

• Cath Clarke, Guardian [UK]

  With nil insight - into the sex industry or anything else - you might conclude Pimp is a film for men who get their kicks watching Dyer strut around leering at topless women who -- in the parlance of the film -- look like "the basic pleasure model".

• David Hayles, Times [UK]

  It does, however, make you pity the desperate men and women who allow themselves to be degraded on camera for a few quid (the actors in Pimp).

• David Jenkins, Time Out

  With its excessive levels of casual racism, sexism and homophobia, the film feels like nothing more than a rejected 'Derek and Clive' sketch that's been stripped of eloquence and irony and calibrated instead for cheap, leery laughs.

Read all 11 critic reviews