With its bumbling take on the London crime scene and love for heavy artillery, High Heels and Low Lifes is kind of like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Tarts -- though the "tarts" in question are only mistaken for prostitutes, and only one of them smokes. Director Mel Smith confidently transplants the criminal quirks and clipped menace of a Guy Ritchie film into a female-empowerment buddy comedy. It's as fun as it is frivolous -- which is to say, a lot on both fronts -- and even manages to include a few split screens and other snazzy visuals. American Mary McCormack and Brit Minnie Driver are the stylishly dressed, haphazard amateurs, whose poor anticipation of thug reprisal nearly gets them killed on several occasions. Driver in particular gets huge mileage from her charming array of facial expressions, from surprised to rattled to gleeful. While the struggling actress played by McCormack gets plenty of real-world opportunities to ply her trade, Driver too, a nurse, finds herself repeatedly applying pressure to bullet wounds, even sometimes yelling to a downed adversary that she'll call for an ambulance. It's when the film gives itself over to these sillier escapist instincts that it begins to fly. High Heels and Low Lifes starts out with some false, self-conscious gestures toward scruples and soul-searching, including a trumped-up shouting match between the two conflicted leads. But when it settles into an amoral but lightweight cartoon, meant for kicks rather than realism, it hits the mark.
