Review: Get Duked! Cheekily Mashes Up Social Critique and Genre Thrills

Three juvenile delinquents from the big city and a home-schooled nerd are thrust into the Scottish Highlands and hunted down by a pair of upper-crust psychopaths hellbent on preserving the purity of their country’s bloodline. On paper, that’s a pretty straightforward premise, but Ninian Doff’s feature debut seamlessly weaves blunt yet forceful social critique into its story, which cheekily mashes up horror, comedy, and adventure film tropes. The result is a taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.

Doff wisely wastes no time on needless exposition, setting an irreverent tone right from the start as the four teens view a VHS tape from the 1980s that explains the purpose of an adventure competition to win the Duke of Edinburgh Award—getting young delinquents “out of the city and into the countryside”—with a wink and a nod to the classist and racist impulses embedded in such bourgeois programs of cultural assimilation. While few attempts beyond that are made to expand on this commentary, Get Duked! takes great pleasure in mocking the ruling class, with Eddie Izzard and Georgie Glen donning human skin masks and playing their parts as hunters of lower-class kids with an appropriately unrestrained and gleeful lunacy.

The trio of rabble-rousing friends from the city—Dean (Rian Gordon), the leader of their pack, DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja), a wannabe rapper, and Duncan (Lewis Gribben), a dopey pyromaniac—are joined by Ian (Samuel Bottomley), the dorky outsider who actually chose to come along for the ride. And in the film’s first half, Doff relies primarily on the verbal jousting between the foursome to keep things lively as they struggle to find out who’s hunting them across the Highlands and, after accidentally using the wrong piece of their map to roll a joint, where exactly they’re supposed to be heading. And while there are stretches here that seem to drag, suggesting that the film is trying to get its bearings, Doff is actually rather meticulously putting pieces of the plot in motion that will, in some cases, pay off later in the story.

Get Duked! really leans into the sheer absurdity of its scenario when two bumbling small-town police officers (Kate Dickie and Kevin Guthrie), wrongfully suspicious of a terrorist plot involving pedophiles, urban gangs, and zombies, arrive on the scene. In one particularly ludicrous sequence, DJ Beatroot—who has long been ribbed for both his lack of fans and for not realizing that his rap moniker is also a type of vegetable—finally gets his moment to shine. After stumbling upon a barn full of farmers who’ve been enjoying one of his many self-hyped mixtapes, DJ Beatroot is instantly celebrated. The group even turns him on to the hidden psychedelic properties found in the region’s rabbit shit, setting up an amusingly hallucinogenic rendition of the young rapper’s titular song.

Throughout DJ Beatroot’s performance of the song, as well as during scenes featuring songs by Danny Brown, Run the Jewels, and Vince Staples, Doff gets to flex the skills he honed on the set of many a music video, breathing a visual creativity and propulsive energy into the film that’s lacking in other parts. And as the police and farmers are further intertwined into the film’s plot, the purpose behind earlier events begin to click into place and jokes receive increasingly deranged callbacks, building to an inspired deus ex machina that manages to cleverly tie several loose ends together. Would that the entire film had been as visually and narratively imaginative as the final half hour, but Get Duked! offers enough evidence to suggest that Doff may be a new comedic voice to look out for.