Rarely have I seen a film so accurately, if accidentally, named as Crawl. Paul China's film does just that as it slowly works its way through a thin storyline to reach a pointless conclusion. While pointless padding seems to the curse of modern cinema, for an 80 minute movie to be so heavily stretched out is remarkable.

The sad thing is that the film has a lot of potential. It opens well, with a mysterious Croatian hit man (George Shevtsov) shooting a garage owner in the head. Shevtsov is cast against type – he looks like he should be playing a kindly uncle, not a ruthless, coked up killer and the film evokes a real sense of style. But it all rapidly starts to fall apart. We're introduced to barmaid Marilyn Burns (Georgina Haig) – and yeah, that is a blatant Texas Chain Saw reference – who is eagerly awaiting the arrival home of boyfriend Travis, who she is convinced will be proposing. But through a series of frankly unconvincing coincidences, Travis is hit by the Croatian's car on the way home, and the injured killer decides to take refuge in the nearest house, which just happens to where Marilyn lives.

China clearly wants to be the Coen Brothers so badly that it hurts, and so while Crawl has a real sense of style about it, it's a style lifted directly from Blood Simple. But that film is great not only because it looks good but because it reinvents film noir and shows how the best-laid plans can quickly go disastrously wrong. The characters in Blood Simple are strung up by their own over-reaching ambition, but in this film, they just seem dumb. Here, we have a woman who is expecting two people to call on her, and yet reacts to a knock on the door with immediate fear, for example. It might be good for raising tension if it made contextual sense, but it doesn't and so the viewer is immediately irritated by her skittishness. Supporting characters are introduced as if they will play some significant part in the proceedings and then simply written off and forgotten about (Paul Holmes as the sleazy bar boss who hired the hitman to begin with is built up as important and then rather pointlessly disposed of) and the music sounds like Bernard Hermann if Bernard Hermann was terrible. Seriously – I began to wonder if the clichéd score, which probably would've been rejected as hackneyed in the 1950s, was included as some sort of joke.

But the real problem with Crawl is the pacing. I'll be kind and assume that the long, excessively drawn out scenes of people looking around a room, staring at doorknobs etc are failed attempts to rack up the tension rather than a cynical way of stretching the film to feature length, but either way, they don't work. In the end, Crawl feels like a potentially very good 30 minute film that has been slowed down to reach feature length. And that is not a good thing.

Crawl should be exciting. It isn't. It should be tense. It isn't. And that's irritating, because when you can see what this film could have been, its failures seem even larger. In the end, Crawl commits the one crime that a thriller can never commit – it's boring.

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