You don't know Jack

You Don't Know Jack will be a front-runner for Golden Globes and other prizes. The Emmys went to its lead actor (Al Pacino) and writer (Adam Mazer) for their gripping portrayal of Dr Jack Kevorkian and his 1990s campaign to have doctor-assisted euthanasia legalised in the USA. The impassioned advocate of assisted suicide is an odd heroic character in American medical and legal history, a cantankerous egocentric played to irritating perfection by Pacino.

Directed by Barry Levinson, who'd worked well with Pacino in the past (And Justice For All), the HBO movie also showcases the veteran talents of Brenda Vaccaro (as Jack's sister and accomplice), Susan Sarandon (Hemlock Society activist and friend), John Goodman (long-term medical ally) and Danny Huston (invincible pro-bono defence lawyer and failed Michigan governor-candidate Geoffrey Fieger).

Kevorkian, the American-born son of Armenian refugees, was a retired pathologist in his early 60s when he began his Quixotic activism on behalf of terminally ill patients. For almost a decade, despite harassment and prosecutions by Michigan police and politicians, he conducted at least known 130 suicide procedures. The taped testimonies and appeals of his free-of-charge clients and their loved ones were Kevorkian's strongest defence. So was the fact that each patient manipulated the switch that began their lethal drug or gas procedure.

Kevorkian learned to play the angry fool and work with the media, fasting while in custody and appearing in court in 18th-century costume to face a Common Law charge filed by an obsessed local prosecutor. Although he won legal and PR battles, Kevorkian had his medical licence revoked and his activism banned.

He was determined to challenge the hypocritical set-up which allowed doctors to take comatose patients off life-support systems but forbade euthanasia for coherent patients. Finally, breaking court orders, he deliberately administered the lethal dosage to a helpless patient. Two months later, he gave the tape of that death to 60 Minutes + and was interviewed by Mike Wallace. The state could not ignore the provocation. Using tactical cunning, Michigan prosecutors dropped the charge of assisting suicide, thereby keeping the dead patient's wife and brother from being called as defence witnesses. Possibly hoping to become an imprisoned martyr, Kevorkian foolishly chose to defend himself in his fifth and final trial.

Convicted of second-degree murder, he served more than eight years in prison, and recently completed two years of parole during which he was allowed only to discuss euthanasia, not to practise or promote it. The US Supreme Court had refused to hear his appeal, denying him the platform he'd always sought.

A dramatic often melodramatic story with a charismatic lead figure, the Kevorkian saga is ideal biopic material. The HBO acting ensemble present it excellently, and Levinson's direction finely blended contrasting styles of documentary realism and Greek tragedy. Pacino's performance is commanding, the histrionics controlled, the mannerisms telling, the character flaws displayed dispassionately. Although the screenplay gilded the lily too much by gratuitously showing the social misfit's talents as an instrumentalist, composer, theatre buff and oil painter, they did help to establish the "Doctor of Death" as a very human megalomaniac.

Aftershock

The PRC's movie industry has produced many art-house favourites; its mass-market spectaculars haven't earned similar international attention. Aftershock might have done so. Let's see, after January 2011, whether China's official Oscar nominee makes it to the shortlist (in competition, among around 80 others, with Hong Kong's Echoes of the Rainbow and Taiwan's Monga). [None of them reached the longlist.]

Aftershock is the first major commercial IMAX movie made outside the US. The 2010 PRC-IMAX co-production (the first of a contracted three) dramatises the aftermath of the disastrous 1976 Tangshan earthquake and adds a contemporary reference to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's the top Chinese box-office grosser, quickly leaping ahead of The Founding of a Republic.

240,000 people died in Tangshan. If Hollywood had recreated the mass tragedy, the movie would have innumerable sub-plots catering to all major demographic groups, age ranges, races and sexual interests. In China, director Feng Xiaogang focuses exclusively on one mother and her young twin children, and there are moments when a viewer aches for a sub-plot or two to lighten the mood and present a few fresh faces.

This movie is a champion exploitative tear-jerker. It's a 10,000-tissue weepie in which the children's father dies in the earthquake, the distraught mother is faced with a Sophie's Choice, the son loses an arm, the daughter survives unknowingly and is adopted by married PLA soldiers in the earthquake rescue teams. The mother cannot forgive herself for having made her choice, neither can the daughter, and the audience is frequently given emotional dialogue, heart-rending situations and musical prompts all designed to squeeze its tear ducts, mercilessly.

The mother and daughter are played wonderfully well (by Xu Fan, the director' wife, and the very busy Zhang Jingchu respectively), considering that a forgivable reaction to each of their stiffly self-absorbed characters would be to scream and demand that they stop being somewhat tedious self-sacrificing egocentrics. But if they did, the screenplay would be a lot shorter and more rational.

The rest of the cast is admirable (especially Chen Diaoming as the adoptive father), as are the cinematography, special effects (directed by ubiquitous Phil Jones), costumes and subtle government propaganda (on behalf of the PLA, Tangshan and China's modernisation). Director Feng has a successful track record, progressing from Chinese TV series in the 90s to writing and directing many mainstream movie hits (Happy Funeral, World Without Thieves, If You Are the One). He also directed Banquet, produced and directed Assembly, produced Cellphone and has been a movie actor.

IMAX and his co-owned Chinese production company will be happy with him; his epic had a reported budget of less than US$25 million. Its earnings in China and international markets will more than compensate for its likely inability to obtain any wide distribution in the USA. A few scenes in Vancouver, where the bitter daughter somehow (unexplained) ends up married to a Caucasian lawyer, were probably designed to help its entry to the Canadian market, both on IMAX and regular screens.

[The excellent review by Kevin Ma in lovehkfilm.com is fiercely critical of Feng's commercial and political considerations.]

Triads, yardies & onion bhajees!

Any movie whose IMDb listing tells you that it had a budget of 900 pounds sterling has to be seen to be believed. Its title is just as incredible: Triads, Yardies and Onion Bhajees! (the 2003 movie originally carrying a sub-title, Once Upon a Time in Southall).

British (Punjabi-Indian) director Sarjit Bains' first feature is a tale of four London gangs. Like his second feature (the 2007 comedy, Cash and Curry) it was written by Manish Patel, born in a border town "between Tanzania and Zanzibar". Patel wrote the novel (The Stone Shiva) on which his screenplay is based, and also plays Singh, the lead character and champion hitman.

He works for the Asian gang ("The Holy Smokes") that controls west London from its Southall base. The actor cast as the leader of the cockney gang ("The English Firm") running the rackets in east London is Dave Courtney, a self-proclaimed gangster-turned-writer and occasional member of Patel and Bains' indie movie-making outfit.

North London is under the control of the Chinese "Triads", while the Jamaicans ("Yardies") own the south of the city. Watching them all and adding narrative links is a corrupt cop, played by Jonathan Reason, another gangster-movie specialist. Just to make sure that the goulash is juicy enough, Patel adds the real-life Heathrow Airport robbery to his criminal recipe.

The British market must be significant for such low-budget blood-and-action 18-plus gangster tales, and the frequency with which Guy Richie and other better-known British directors made them is now more explicable. They were (some still are) probably driven by commercial forces rather than personal fixations. If the gangster genre is popular, it's one that start-up movie-makers must work with if they want to make a living and a name.

As one of their dvd extras reveals with quiet pride, Patel (his own producer) and Bains (a one-man cinematography team and his own editor) made their movie in ten days using a camcorder. That 900-pounds claim can be believed. So can the movie much of the time. Its small-screen scale intensifies its mockumentary stylishness. The editing is fast (though too often frenetic), hand-held camera skips cut interestingly between faces (albeit too often too jerkily), and the soundtrack's contemporary Indian music also adds pace (and is only occasionally too loud).

Although the storyline promises a multi-ethnic criminal caper, this is primarily a tale of expatriate Indians and their west London crime syndicate. Patel's character has a girlfriend who's the sister of the Jamaican gang boss, but the key female interest is really the Indian goddess Kali, inspiring the anti-hero to single-handedly wipe out all the gangs' members.

The ageing white British actors look and sound convincing members of the criminal class; the non-white actors mostly appear too dulcet-toned and polite for their roles. They sound as if they'd been to good schools, but not to acting schools that would have taught them how to sound more credibly uncouth and villainous.

Onion Bhajees? That's how the Indian gang smuggles cocaine past sniffer dogs.

Yves St Laurent

If Hollywood makes a YSL bioepic soon, an obvious choice for lead actor would be Crispin Glover, the unforgettably gangly George McFly from the first Back to the Future. The intensely nervous shyly-smiling French couturier resembles McFly in Yves St Laurent: his life and times, one of two 2002 documentaries about him written and directed by then-unknown David Teboul.

The pair of insider stories was clearly produced with the full cooperation of YSL, his business and ex-marital partner Pierre Berge, and some of their fashion house personnel and close friends (such as actress Catherine Deneuve and socialite Betty Catroux). It would not be too cynical to assume that the circumspect 75-minute overview of YSL's life and 60-minute inside glimpses of his fashion house were PR efforts and pre-retirement commemorative archives.

It helps an audience if it can jump to the appropriate conclusions about matters that are only referred to obliquely, including YSL's domineering mother and his electricity-shocked spell in a mental hospital, cocaine addiction (one of "naughty things" YSL admits to impishly), wild nightclubbing in Paris and NY, sexual separation from Berge, and YSL's home in Marrakesh.

Some omitted facts are odd: why no mention of the US millionaire who was a key backer of YSL's solo venture in 1962? Or YSL's successful legal action for wrongful dismissal by the owner of the Dior house? The subsequent takeover (rescue? sell-out? opportunistic deal?) of YSL by the conglomerate owning Gucci also needed attention, as did its use of Gucci's Tom Ford as YSL's creative director.

It's understandable that Berge's conviction and fine for insider trading in 1996, for suspiciously timely sales of YSL stock, is not mentioned, but Berge himself reveals the gossipy news that he had been in a relationship with painter Bernard Buffet for eight years before he was introduced to YSL in 1958. Gratuitous as well as gossipy: Berge doesn't add the news that Buffet married a writer-actress in December the same year and had three children.

A fuller account of YSL's relationship with Berge (from the viewpoint of Berge, who was still alive in 2010 at the age of 79), and the multi-million-euro auction of their joint art collection in 2008, has been told by another French documentary-maker (L'amour fou). It was screened at the 2010 Toronto film festival, won an award there, and should be worth looking out for.

In Teboul's earlier movies, key threads more than justify the severe trimming of YSL's real life and times. Above all else, the designer's sketches and finished clothes illustrate the remarkable four-decades-long career of an artist of both haute couture and pret-a-porter. YSL explains, succinctly and disarmingly honestly, that he was great but that the only true master couturiers were Balenciaga and Chanel. He was approaching their level, he believed, but it is clear from the interview sessions that YSL, haggard and hesitant, slow-thinking and addicted to cigarettes, was close to death at the start of the 21st century. He died of brain cancer in 2008.

One fascinating counterpoint for fashion buffs to watch is Valentino : The Last Emperor. A similar saga of the fashion world's pampered pets, superegos and business-minded lovers, that "official" documentary reveals a central character who was more joyous, self-loving and flamboyant but, I'd guess, much less talented as a leading figure of fashion.

Exam

Brief close-up scenes introduce eight candidates prepping themselves for an Exam. It will land one of them a top corporate job. They troop into a windowless room with eight desks, an armed guard, and a black British "Invigilator" who details the rules governing their 80-minute test, and then leaves the room. The winner will be the one who answers the question on a test paper.

They immediately realise that the blank papers do not contain a question. After a complaining Cantonese-British woman breaks the ground rules and is ejected by the guard, the surviving seven candidates set out to find the question.

A self-assertive "White" man leaps into alpha dominance, bullying the other males (brown, black and deaf) and the females (blond, brunette and dark). One by one, they reveal their characters during the group efforts to discover if the question can be revealed by varying light sources or liquids. Twists and turns in their relationships and personalities lead to the inevitable stand-offs, threats, bloodshed, final countdown and incredible plot resolutions.

Inevitably, writer-producer-director Stuart Hazeldine's debut feature movie has been seen as a Brit movie version of US TV's The Apprentice. It's also akin to Das Experiment, Battle Royale and other movies that dramatised group dynamics and militaristic tendencies. Above all, though, from Hazeldine's own point of view, his low-budget exercise marks the completion of his movie-making apprenticeship.

A post-uni migrant to Hollywood, the Surrey-born Englishman earned a living by turning out original screenplays and re-writes from 1995 onwards, often in collaboration with Greek-Australian director Alex Proyas. Some were produced, including his rewrites for Proyas's Knowing (starring Nicolas Cage) and the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (his second, uncredited, joint effort with director Scott Derrickson), starring Keanu Reeves. Having gained on-site experience, and the necessary production funds, he was ready to go back to the UK and make his first solo feature.

It earned him a BAFTA nomination for outstanding debut feature, in 2010, alongside stronger competition (David Jones's winning Moon and Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy), a drug saga and a documentary. It was a worthwhile homeward step for him to take: he's now back in Hollywood, doing his own things in much bigger ways.

Mid-August lunch

Gianni Di Gregorio was almost 60 in 2008, and the Italian only had a few movie industry credits. They began a decade earlier when he worked as an assistant director and small-part actor on Matteo Garrone's Guests, the indie writer-director's award-winning docudrama about Albanian immigrants.

Di Gregorio became an occasional member of Garrone's movie-making team, most notably when he co-wrote the screenplay of Gomorrah, a docudrama tragicomic study of Italian criminals. It garnered 40 award nominations (including the 2008 Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Foreign Film) and 23 wins.

Garrone produced Di Gregorio's debut writing-directing feature, a short (70-minute) tale about four very old ladies, which also premiered in 2008. The low-budget movie, filmed in the apartment where Garrone had taken care of his own ageing mother, is an Italian equivalent of Mike Leigh's British docudramas. It uses natural light, unflattering close-ups, non-professional actors and well-planned improvisations to depict the lives of ordinary people reacting to special situations.

Di Gregorio kept his budget very low by casting himself as the late-middle-aged man housekeeping and cooking for his spirited nonagenarian mother. His apartment building's manager and doctor both ask him to erase his debts to them by looking after their mothers too during Italy's mid-August public holiday (Ferragosto). One of them brings her sister along, filling his small home with a quartet of very individualistic old ladies.

He prepares meals for and with them, handles their temper tantrums, gets help from a drinking buddy on the farewell lunch, and happily agrees to extend the rejuvenated visitors' holiday. The fable steers clear of sentimentality, allowing the old women to show personality flaws and facial antiquity. Their gathering turns into a seniors' pyjama party without being overly cute or artificially comic. This isn't an Italian Golden Girls, but neither is it earnest neo-realism. Well photographed, edited and designed, this could have also been an old-style BBC TV drama.

Gregorio found two of the old ladies in his family and the other two in an old folks' home. He is a charming, convincing central figure for their narrative, and it's hoped he and the Garrone team are able to make other indie movies that illustrate real Italian lifestyles.

La graine et le mulet

La graine et le mulet, lower-cased as titles are in France, was given an art-housey English-language title, The Secret of the Grain. The French words literally translate as "The grain and the mullet", and the movie's grain is that used to make Couscous, which was the film's alternative and more appetising title for foreign markets.

The documentary-style 2.5-hour saga shows the attempt by a gaunt 60-year-old Arab-French dock labourer and his extended family to create a specialty fish couscous restaurant on a dilapidated boat in the Mediterranean fishing port of Sete.

Its Tunis-born Abdellatif Kechiche writer-director has an excellent track record. He won seven awards (including two at Venice) for his debut movie, La faute a Voltaire (Poetical Refugee), in 2000, and another 15 (including 4 Cesars, for Best French film, direction, writing and most promising actress) for his second feature, L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance) in 2003. Couscous collected another 18 awards, including 4 more Cesars in 2008 (the same ones as in 2003) and 5 Venice 2007 awards, and it's a bewitching reason to try and catch up on the earlier works.

Only five of the complex movie's 15 lead roles had ever acted before, and most of them were non-Arab French. Yet the naturalism of the ensemble multi-ethnic (Arab, Russian and French) French-speaking cast is remarkable. They perform with overwhelming credibility in tight close-ups, individually and in clusters, among hand-held cameras, possibly improvising, compelling audiences to feel they inhabit a documentary. Clearly, Kechiche's skills include the abilities to identify and develop natural acting talents in photogenic people.

The central figure of the old man, Slimane (Habib Boufares), struggles with bureaucrats and bankers in his patient effort to create a legacy for his large family. His divorced wife is a master couscous cook, preparing a weekly feast for the extended family and it is her recipe on which unemployed Slimane builds his dream; his key ally is the strong-willed young daughter of his hotel-keeping lover's previous marriage. Towards the end of the movie, her passionate impromptu belly-dance saves cooking time and rewards diners' patience at the boat-restaurant's inaugural feast, threatened with failure when its cauldron of the special couscous goes astray. It's the role of a lifetime, winning newcomer Hafsia Herzi her Cesar.

In the beginning sequences, Kechiche's screenplay introduces the family while Slimane rides his scooter around the port city, dropping off fish for his ex-wife, children and beloved grandkids, and his lover's hotel. At the end, circumstances bring them together, but there are no easy happy endings in this enchanting family story, and Kechiche leaves his audience to imagine the future fates of Slimane and his family. It's unlikely that such a master movie-maker would indulge us with a Hollywood-style sequel.

City island

Way back when, before there was a surfeit of oddball Jewish-American family comedy-dramas, there were Italian-American and then black-American comidramas galore. No other major ethnic genre emerged, and the probably inevitable Latino-American genre is yet to mutate in big numbers. We must await a crop of Latino film school graduates with production funds. A good role model for them will be City Island, writer-producer-director Raymond De Felitta's debut movie.

The black comedy of Italian-American manners stars co-producer Andy Garcia as a prison guard, who tells the audience that his home island, a small reality in the middle of the river in Bronx, comprises clam-diggers and mussel-suckers (native-born and immigrants). So does every community, and that's the charm of De Felitta's madcap romp: ignore the accents and the movie can be enjoyed as magical realism about an off-beat Everyman and his family of secrets and silly characters.

One also needs to ignore the wild incredibilities of coincidental happenings forming the plot's cobweb. Garcia's correctional services officer discovers his previously-unknown 24-year-old son (NYC model/actor/singer Steven Strait) at work, and takes him out of custody and into his home without revealing the secret relationship. His other big secret is attending acting classes (conducted by Alan Arkin) where he meets an Englishwoman (Emily Mortimer) with a secret. He hasn't told his wife (ER veteran Juliana Margulies) anything, and the audience has to try and believe that neither knows the other is also a secret smoker. Their snappy daughter (Garcia's real-life daughter, Dominik) is a secret stripper; their sassy son (Ezra Californication Miller) is a fantasist for fat females, one of whom lives next-door and operates a web-cam site and another is a schoolmate.

If that line-up sounds like a recipe for an Italian goulash, it is. Most of the time, it's a tasty broth of screaming fits, Catholic guilt, comic confusions and good old-fashioned ensemble acting. The end scenes find the whole ensemble standing on their kerbside marks, woodenly, and dining at their beachside table ebulliently (cue overhead crane shot) but that's how ethnic genre comidramas are supposed to end.

The movie is a calling card of competence and entertainment value for De Fellita, a New Yorker (of course) who's also a professional jazz pianist and composer. His second feature movie, due for release in 2011, is reportedly another NY-set comedy about marital infidelity. De Fellita is right to stick with a winning formula once more.

Cemetery Junction

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have been on a long roll in British TV, from Meet Ricky Gervais (2000) through The Office and Extras. The writing-producing-directing team made their feature film debut with Cemetery Junction in 2010, and the roll seemed to have ended. Straining to be a cohesive and funny sequence of incidents, their movie is scrappy, mostly crude and rarely witty. It clearly needed experienced producers to tell the creative pair where to sharpen their screenplay, strengthen its narrative and tighten the direction.

Set in 1973, the very English movie covers the coming-of-age for a trio of youths (and compares, unfavourably, with similar period pieces such as An Education). Gervais and Merchant's likeable likely lads live in a fictitious town, Cemetery Junction, near Reading (the birthplace of Gervais). Location shots portray a town with a split personality, part picture-postcard rural village, part slummy housing.

There's also a factory where one youth (played by Tom Hughes) works; he's a belligerent scrapper who despises his sick beer-swilling single father. At the local railway station, a second youth is a foul-mouthed simple-minded chubby nonentity (Jack Doolan). Their mutual friend, Freddie, is the son of a bigoted factory worker (Gervais, in laid-back comic mode) whose own live-in mother is a sharper-tongued bigot (Anne Reid, in a more acidic, and funnier, mode). Freddie's mother is also a bitch, and it's a mystery how Freddie could be such a handsome, long-haired, good-natured, easily-influenced central figure (Christian Cooke, a British TV series actor like his two co-leads).

Seeking a better life, he goes to work for an insurance company whose insensitive boss is from the same town (Ralph Fiennes, continuing to pop up with sneering stylishness in far too many sub-par cameo roles). He chauvinistically ignores his wife (Emily Watson dressed in dutifully ignorable fashion, and displaying a scene-stealing range of silent moues and eye glances). He plans to get his daughter (Jessica Jones) married to a smarmy super-salesman (Matthew Goode, back from A Single Man and other better roles in Hollywood).

This being an English comidrama, we also get a stack of unbelievable plot-supporting time-filling characters a la Richard Curtis: avuncular local policeman, snide local detective, cafeteria eccentrics, sweetly simple plain girl, sexy black dancer. There are the customary banquet,party and disco scenes (expensively staged gifts for Equity's real extras), and the usual novice movie director's visual flourishes via panes of glass, B&W photo freezes and pans of pretty landscapes.

Gervais can do better, and did so recently in Hollywood with his debut solo writing-directing-acting turn, The Invention of Lying. Merchant didn't work on that, and Gervais may need to ask himself if an old working relationship has become a creative drawback.

My name is Khan

Moviegoers who felt that Slumdog Millionaire was OTT in its sentimental depiction of Indian urban horrors possibly excused them as melodramatic allegorical symbols. In fact, they were typical plot angles from a movie industry whose home audiences presumably love to wallow in Dickensian emotions and Perils of Pauline sentimentality. A recent overdose of such maudlin plotting is My Name is Khan, a 165-minute warning to avoid romantic dramas from Bollywood unless they are one's big cup of char.

This one gained attention because Fox Star reportedly paid a record billion rupees for distribution rights, promoted it well enough to make a profit, and issued an international dvd.

Solitary man

Actors who play nasty characters need to be self-confident and talented. They must make their audience both dislike, and empathise with, them, as Michael Douglas always does, like his father did. Could he do it again in the acidly comic Solitary Man?

His title character, Ben Kaplen, is a chronically egocentric and amoral auto dealer and womaniser increasingly needing to be made aware of his mortality, age, lies, delusions and unpleasantness. Can he redeem himself and could we care?

Douglas performs well in a sequence of incidents, but the screenplay's anti-hero is almost too bad to be true. Few of his supporting characters are credible either, and their strained dialogue is wasted on Susan Sarandon (separated, bitchy yet still loving wife), Mary-Louise Parker (bitchy divorcee girlfriend), Imogen Potts (tell-tale girlfriend's sleep-around tell-tale daughter), Jesse Eisenberg (young college protege who's too nice to be true), and Danny DeVito (long-ignored college pal and deli-owner who's too kind to be true).

The basic premise stretches the audience's tolerance too. We have to believe that a super-sharp business magnate, previously rich enough to endow his old uni with a library and more, fears a heart test may foretell imminent death and therefore goes fornicating, defrauding and cheating to his sick heart's content. In addition, an audience must believe that 60-something Douglas could still charm almost all the birds he wants off the trees and into his bed, and treat them rotten after.

One contrived incident follows another as we track an ageing rake's self-propelled downhill progress to working behind a deli counter. I didn't care, and hung on mainly in the hope of seeing Douglas perform a death scene.

The movie's co-writer/directors, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, have been a busy creative partnership since Rounders (1998). They worked with Steven Soderbergh on Oceans 13 and The Girlfriend Experience and need a big winner wearing their own colours. This super-typical Douglas vehicle wasn't the ticket, grossing only US$4 million at the box office.

Maybe American audiences are tired of menopausal Hollywood males' disproportionate fixation on ageing men (mostly Jewish-American) and their unhappy families. Their man of misery has been Serious (Coen Brothers) and Single (Tom Ford) as well as Solitary in the past year, joined by Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) and far too many other middle-aged egos and sagging libidos. They warrant a separate movie genre, one that should be terminated.

Wild target

Pierre Salvadori gained a Cesar nomination for Best First Feature for his direction (and writing) of Cible Emouvante, his 1993 farce about a middle-aged hitman, his domineering mother, a wild young woman and a clumsy youth. He'd gained the good services of good actors and the movie did well.

He may now well regret his authorisation of a British remake. Re-written by Lucinda Coxon, its title and most of its plot faithfully translated, Wild Target was directed by the multi-talented award-winning Jonathan Lynn, whose immortality is ensured by his co-creation of Yes, Minister.

They also assembled a cast of star movie names: Bill Nighy (diffident shifty-eyed hitman), Eileen Atkins (monstrous mother guarding family's reputation as assassins), Emily Blunt (devil-may-care conwoman) and Rupert (Harry Potter's sidekick Ron) Grint (immature lad again). Rupert Everett joins them as the suave bearded millionaire who's hired Nighy to kill Blunt, alongside Martin (BBC TV's The Office) Freeman as the rival hitman Everett hires to kill Nighy and Blunt.

If it sounds promising, it probably was. The end result is a sad disappointment. The screenplay falls flat when it tries to be funny, cute or dramatic; the direction plods; and the cast looks embarrassed (most noticeably Nighy, whose shrunken screwed-up eyes occasionally flicker nervously into the camera's gaze, looking as if they're begging to be released from the body that got them into the sorry mess). The audience can only feel embarrassed when Blunt's character has to fall into instant love with Nighy, sensing him to be her trusty oak tree.

The Isle of Man provided funds and production facilities, and it should be regretting endowing a few lucky civil servants with a film fund (everyone else has one, so why not one for Douglas too, they may have argued?). I'll try to catch the French original, knowing that the French usually do farce with more flair than Brits.