Welcome to the Punch

Cast

Production

The film was produced by Ben Pugh and Rory Aitken of Between the Eyes, who also produced Eran Creevy's debut feature SHIFTY. Brian Kavanaugh-Jones also served as a producer on the movie with Worldview Entertainment. Ridley Scott and Liza Marshall of Scott Free executive produced the film. Shooting took place mostly in London, starting 28 July. Some of the interior and exterior scenes were filmed at London College of Communication in Elephant and Castle in August 2011. City of Westminster College's Paddington Green Campus was used for the press conference scene.

Release

Welcome To The Punch premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival. It debuted in third place in the United Kingdom on 15 March 2013, where it grossed £460,000 across 370 cinemas in its opening weekend. In 2012 IFC Films bought distribution rights for the United States, and it opened on 27 March 2013, where it grossed $9,747. It was released on home video in the U.K. in July 2013.

Reception

The film received a mixed, critical reception. Rotten Tomatoes sampled 49 reviewers and judged 51% of the reviews to be positive, with an average score of 5.6. The site described the film as "a little deeper and more thoughtful than most police dramas – but not quite enough to surmount its thinly-written characters and numbing violence". On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 49 out of 100, indicating "mixed or average" reviews from 16 critics. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated it 2/5 stars and called it an ambitious but predictable film that "runs out of steam" by the end. Emma Dibdin of Total Film rated it 3/5 stars and wrote, "There’s an emotional vacuum at its centre but Welcome To The Punch is an adrenalin shot to the heart of the Brit-crime genre." Dan Jolin of Empire rated it 4/5 stars and called it "a confident, ambitious and action-rich Brit thriller, albeit one whose characters and clarity suffer from the frantic intensity of its pacing." Guy Lodge of Variety described it as "a proficient but personality-free policer that demands little of either its audience or its enviable best-of-British cast". Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "But despite its fast pacing and well-staged action set-pieces, the film fails to make much of an impression." Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times called it "derivative, dumb fun". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that it is an "enjoyable absurdity" that is unintentionally funny yet still recommended.