Cashback attempts so much in its lean running time, and yet achieves so very little. It strives for gravitas, depth, humour, and tries to engage with issues such as love, mortality, and friendship, but manages to completely miss the mark at every turn. Any successful attempts to show the mixture of emotions that Ben, our young protagonist, is feeling are quickly lost in the mix of puerile jokes, graphic nudity, naiveté and, worst of all, a cliché-ridden love story. It would be fruitless, however, to simply continue to bash this odd little film, so instead I will focus here on a slightly wider issue: Cashback’s place within recent British cinema. I want to talk about how it follows safe, predicable formulas that we are so very used to seeing in modern British films, and also think a little about the film in relation to the time at which it has arrived: a moment in which British films seem to be in something of a dire situation.

Just over a year ago I was reviewing a clutch of films for this site that were all intriguing, diverse, unique British films: The Last King of Scotland, Venus, Hot Fuzz and Sunshine, and before that I wrote an essay on the ever-interesting Michael Winterbottom. Add to this list other solid, if not always outstanding, British films such as 28 Weeks Later, Grow Your Own, and Magicians, and we may see that the first half of last year saw UK cinema produced a number of decent films within a wide range of genres and styles, and with the potential for varied audiences. The year perhaps trailed out, with only Atonement making any real impact, whilst other British films were both disappointing and American-backed (Run, Fat boy, Run, Elizabeth: The Golden Age); however, as a whole the British film industry seemed to be putting out a solid range of constantly engaging, occasionally inspired, work.

The year’s other releases so far have included Three and Out, Flashbacks of a Fool, The Bank Job, and Paul Andrew Williams’ follow-up to London to Brighton (2005), The Cottage. All of these films are firmly genre works, aiming to pick up a small, perhaps cult followings, and yet all of them are underwhelming, ranging from the solid, superficial and fun (The Cottage) to the downright frustratingly inept (Three and Out). These films represent the limits of current British cinema, following the same tired patterns and aiming for an audience that they complacently believe is already in place. None manage to show anything particularly special or unique, and all are so self-consciously like so many other films that have gone before them.

Cashback is a perfect example of a British film trying to be something it feels it must be, seemingly focusing it sights on past films and styles instead of doing what its central conceit suggests it should have been doing: building on a nicely original concept, and being a small, insightful film about love in the twenty first century. You cannot help but think how much the filmmakers were imitating other films whilst making Cashback, instead of concentrating on the actual film that was sitting in front of them.

The British film industry is one that is hard to categorise and pin down, but by looking at what has come out in the last year or so, we can see a pattern emerging: films either embracing a particular genre and then pushing at its boundaries, or those which unimaginatively and uninterestingly ape a stale conception of the genre they strive to exist within. A few years ago there was a little-seen British film called Late Night Shopping (2001), a witty antidote to the indie Hollywood boom - a sort of British Slacker (1991) or Clerks (1994). It was a modest genre film, had a nice atmosphere, good locations and a witty, irreverent script: a good start, a taste of something perhaps better to come. Depressingly, it seems the British film industry and Sean Ellis have not learnt much since, as Cashback treads the same, now-tired, ground, but with less charm and more self-consciousness. The only thing that Cashback can finally teach the British film industry is how to waste a potentially interesting idea by showering itself with cliché after muddled cliché that it for some reason feels compelled to conform to.