Twist review: Please Sir, don’t give me anymore! This modern spin on Dickens is truly dire

Parkour’s street cred took a battering last year when an old video of health secretary Matt Hancock vaulting over a concrete bollard re-emerged online. Twist, a modern spin on Dickens’ tale that re-imagines Fagin’s gang of pickpockets as a bunch of free running scam artists, is unlikely to do much to rehabilitate its reputation.

From Clueless (Austenian social comedy as told by Beverly Hills teens) to 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew set in an American high school), there’s a whole pantheon of brilliant on-screen updates of classic novels, but this isn’t one of them. Rafferty Law, son of Jude, does his best as Oliver aka Twist, an orphaned graffiti artist who uses those parkour skills to scale high-rise buildings and turn them into towering works of public art. “The higher up I put my work, the more people can see it,” he muses, like Robin Hood armed with a spray can.

The police don’t take such an idealistic view, though - luckily a gang of erratically dressed petty criminals are on hand to help him out of a sticky situation with the law. There’s Dodge, a gender-swapped Artful Dodger played by Rita Ora in her latest pivot to acting, her pal Batesey (Franz Drameh) and Red, real name Nancy, who Oliver (sorry, Twist) seems to fall in love with over the course of a free running montage. Through them, our hero is inducted into a gang of hoodlums presided over by the elderly Fagin (Michael Caine), an art dealer who now specialises in forgeries and gallery heists.

Wondering how Caine’s agent pitched this particular project to the two-time Oscar winner is probably a more entertaining endeavour than sticking out Twist’s 90 minute run time. It’s also hard to fathom what drew Game of Thrones villainess Lena Headey to the one-note part of (Bill) Sikes, whose stomping and snarling is fatally undercut by the fact that she’s been styled to look a bit like lovely Strictly host Claudia Winkleman, with an eyelid-grazing fringe and plenty of black eyeliner.

If Sikes is proof that gender-flipping a role isn’t inherently interesting or progressive, Red shows that there’s no point chucking in a Strong Female Lead if you’re going to give her a personality cobbled together from #girlboss t-shirt slogans; the pair’s dynamic is entirely unexplored. At least Ora seems to be having a bit of fun, wearing a series of inexplicable hats and dropping aitches with all the gleeful abandon of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Law isn’t bad in his first major role, but there’s a lot working against him here. The dialogue is so leaden (“So, when did you get into free running, then?” is one choice line) and the plot so flimsy that the disengaged mind inevitably meanders towards bigger questions. Are Ora’s wigs better or worse than the ones she wore in the 50 Shades trilogy? Why are even the older characters so good at parkour, an activity that’s surely very hard on the joints? Has anyone non-ironically referred to the police as ‘peelers’ since 1964? And why does crime overlord Fagin live in a warehouse decked out like the set of a mid-Noughties makeover programme, complete with a retro TfL roundel and a neon sign declaring that ‘life’s better when you’re dancing?’ It’s as if he blew all the ill-gotten gains from a high-stakes robbery on a big Etsy order, or held up a branch of Past Times.

When the gang’s scam, targeting creepy art dealer Crispin (David Walliams), finally gets going, it’s clear that Twist fancies itself as a family-friendly Guy Ritchie film: all the stylistic flourishes are present and correct, from the masterplan narrated in voiceover to the fast cuts. Instead, the result is more like a charmless CBBC special with a sprinkling of swearing and a Keith Lemon cameo. The final act, erm, twist feels rushed and incoherent - no wonder the reliably good Noel Clarke, another of Twist’s many underserved cast members, looks baffled as Inspector Brownlow (see what they did there?)

Despite all the efforts to drag a Victorian tale into the 21st century, odd touches like the landfill indie soundtrack (naturally Chelsea Dagger by the Fratellis rears its trilby-hatted head during the heist sequence) leave Twist feeling not just old-fashioned but sluggish. Even the climactic, parkour-inflected chase sequence at the end seems to run out of steam halfway through. It’s certainly ironic that another recent spin on a Dickens classic, Armando Iannucci’s revisionist Personal History of David Copperfield, makes far more exhilarating, contemporary viewing, despite still being set in the 19th century. After reviewing the situation, I can only recommend that you do yourself a favour and watch that instead.

On Sky Cinema and NOW TV from January 29