Francine Black, Staff Reporter

The cast of the movie 'Cop and a Bad Man', from left, Chelsea Brown, who plays Makeda, and Gilbert Tucker, who plays Bandit, pose outside the Carib5 cinema ahead of the premiere of the flick on Wednesday. - Nathaniel Stewart/Freelance Photographer

The premiere of the movie Cop and a Bad Man saw the opening of a low-budget, comedic film about guns and betrayal in the criminal underworld.

The movie opened at Carib5 and at other cinemas across the island on Wednesday. There were two showings, 5:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m., of the film at the Carib5 in Cross Roads, St Andrew.

The majority of the hour-long film, directed by Trenten Gumbs, was shot in Oakland, California, and features a generous use of patois and local songs, especially from the Bounty Killer-led Alliance.

The Queen's diamonds

The movie centres around three men - Massive, played by John Cornelius; Vincent, played by Bogle Dread; and Bandit, played by Gilbert Tucker, who steals the Queen's diamonds from Jamaica and escapes to California.

While Bandit and Massive end up in jail in the States, luck is on Vincent's side, so he stashes some of the diamonds and uses the money from the sale of the rest to set himself up in the illegal drug business. However, Massive manages to get out of jail early and sets out to find Vincent and get his share of the diamonds.

Recover

Then, the really improbable happens, Detective Colonel Stevens, played by Leo Wilson, is sent to California by the Jamaican Government to catch the men and recover the diamonds. He temporarily takes Bandit out of jail to help him with this task. However, the quest to find the diamonds become a tangled web of lies and deception, mixed in with some laughs.

The movie is pretty straight forward and quite predictable with some 'Jamaican' humour mixed in. Some of the characters' acting skills are poor and they fail to come off as the truly Jamaican characters they are portraying. Tucker was arguably the best actor in the film, using his big eyes as a tool to get more laughs from the audience.

The props and plot are both weak and the poor action scenes were more funnier and disappointing than frightening.