Film: Brothers very Grim

'Welsh in the film is a language with two main functions: it's for singing in on special occasions, and it's for talking to dogs in'

Twin Town Kevin Allen (18)

The bright spark in the media liaison department of South Wales Police who thought it would be a good idea to collaborate with the makers of Twin Town isn't going to be Employee of the Month any time soon. The two officers in the film are spectacularly corrupt. Forget about good cop and bad cop, this is weak bad cop and savage bad cop. They are Swansea's major distributors of hard drugs. When things get out of hand and they need to frame some innocent for a murder, they put seven names in a paper bag, give it a shake, then brutally interrogate the lucky winner.

Twin Town gives a rough ride to a number of Welsh institutions. At one point the Lewis brothers (Rhys Ifans and Llyr Evans) - known as "the twins" despite a three year age difference - literally give a rough ride to the local rugby pitch, driving on to it in a stolen car and doing wild manoeuvres. Then again, the local businessman who runs the club uses a ball to keep cocaine in. When first we catch sight of a male voice choir, they're singing that well known Celtic rhapsody, Mungo Jerry's "In The Summertime". If, as one character observes, karaoke is killing the male voice choir, perhaps it will be a merciful release.

The film is being sold as a youth movie, hardly surprisingly after the great success of Trainspotting, but Twin Town is much less studiously alienated. The script, written by the director, Kevin Allen, with Paul Durden, tells the story of a feud between two families, the rich Cartwrights and the poor Lewises. The Lewises live in a caravan, with the twins lodged in a sort of annexe encrusted with hubcaps, while the Cartwrights' address is a spacious home called - with humour that seems more the scriptwriter's than the characters' - the Ponderosa. When Fatty Lewis falls off a ladder while working for Bryn Cartwright, the twins call round to ask for compensation. Bryn says not to bother him, he has a race to get on with, by which he means his "Scalextric". Bryn may buy pounds 40,000 worth of cocaine, but he isn't exactly Mr Big, what with bribing the DJ to let his daughter win the karaoke contest.

The plot is a mixture of imported elements - drug deals, arson, murderous revenge - and domestic ones: dinginess and a desperate pretension. The writing has Alan Bennett moments of tender caricature. After Mrs Cartwright's beloved poodle is killed, the head left in her bed in a miniature rerun of the horse killing from The Godfather, she managed to keep up appearances at the funeral (trainers and rockabilly shoes round the little grave, local vicar bribed to officiate), announcing with shrill poise that "there'll be sausage rolls and Welsh cakes served in the gazebo".

Some of the details, particularly with minor and elderly characters, border on the surrealistic - the old dear who sells the twins her prescribed drugs and enjoys magic mushrooms, the probation officer with the Lady Penelope tie who offers delinquents whisky - but it is precise where it counts. Fatty's family, visiting him in hospital, bring him the necessities of life: isotonic drink, clean underwear, a Wispa and the Evening Post. Fatty isn't exactly a role model - he's as relentlessly foul-mouthed as everyone else in the film - but at least he isn't a tyrant like Bryn Cartwright. When he tells the twins off about their glue sniffing, it's on the basis that they should buy their own. He needs his for his models of boats. None of the men in the film is exactly grown up, though it's odd that the only sexually active ones are middle aged and involved with much younger women.

Wales is much mocked in Twin Town, but in a proprietorial way. The man who delivers the cocaine to Swansea uses the fatal word "Taff", makes jokes about sheep shagging and asks if the city runs to a Versace shop yet, or even a Kwik-Fit.

The scriptwriters clearly feel that you need to be Welsh to be entitled to make sheep-shagging jokes, as they demonstrate with a cameo featuring the director's brother Keith.

In real life, the Welsh language is a polarising issue, both politically and culturally, and most of the actors in the film are Welsh speakers who have performed professionally in Welsh, but Twin Town steps round the issue. The only subtitles accompany a curry house waiter's undetected insults to the Cartwrights. Welsh in the film is a language with two main functions: it's for singing in on special occasions, and it's for talking to dogs in.

Odd man out in the casting is the Scots actor Dougray Scott as Terry, the nastier of the two bent coppers. No one refers to his distinctly different accent, and the character is also internally contradictory, half Tarantino psycho, half blundering henchman. The villain who attacks a kids' marching kazoo band when they don't get out of the way of his car seems very different from the film buff who doesn't want to take on a criminal errand because Serpico is on TV, and who leaves compromising evidence on the scene of a crime because he thinks it's a symbolic, classy, even an Italian touch.

Under the surface of drug taking, expletives and driving indie music (though even here Petula Clark gets a look in), Twin Town isn't actually an unconventional film. The script shows the poor as being generally nicer and warmer than the rich, women generally nicer than men. Family is irreplaceable, and revenge is duly visited on those who destroy it. Where the film scores is with its group portrait of a sour but not meaningless Welsh reality - a world that at least has the merit of being trapped in the present rather than the past.

By the end of the film, the director of photography, John Mathieson, has conjured at least one moment of visual beauty from the unpromising material of Swansea and surroundings: gold sparks from a flare drifting across silvery moonlit clouds. The flare is to signal the male voice choir gathered on the Mumbles pier to launch into "Myfanwy", there's even a Welsh flag in evidence, and the makers of Twin Town seem to have stumbled, from an unexpected direction, on something remarkably like national priden

On release from tomorrow