Awful awful awful!!!

Rating: 2/10 (14 June 2007)

Where do you start, when attempting to catalogue the many flaws in this awful, awful film? Let's see....
1. The script. Gah! What nonsense! Here's a tip for Woody Allen - If you're going to write a story about English people, try listening to how they talk, before putting pen to paper, man! It just didn't sound like the English we here spoken every day in this country. Simply inserting the word "bloody" into every the odd sentence (and incidentally, inserting it in the wrong part of the sentence), does not make a script "English". In particular, the cringe-worthy scenes with Jonothan Ryhs-Meyers and his "chums" from Wimbledon came across as Dawson's Creek meets Shakespeare in Love by way of Dick Van Dyke. Also worth dishonourable mention were the constant, clumsy reminders to the viewers that they are watching a film set in England. Constant references to "Big red London buses" and everyone having "G&T" on the lawn! What ho!
2. The principle characters. Rhys Meyers is a fairly charmless leading man wandering through most of the film doing a faintly camp impression of Pierce Brosnan, and all this film taught me about Scarlett Johannson was that a) she's quite athletic and b) she's not much of an actress. Even so, had the leading man and lady been the greatest actors of our generation, they would have struggled to breathe life into such lazily sketched characters. The characters were immoral, vacuous and thoroughly unpleasant to watch - but these crimes could be forgiven if only they had shown a fragment of charisma, just something, a little glimmer that might have indicated to the audience that we were watching two good looking robots. The whole thing is just lazy, that's all I can say. When Brian Cox gets Rhys-Meyers' character a job "In Business" (capital i capital b), it's almost skipped over as an afterthought, oh and the dreadful scenes in "the office" - Meyers takes an Important Phonecall, Meyers Studies Important Reports - all smacked of a rather cack-handed attempt to illustrate that the young protagonist is now in the exciting world of "Business" and it's never explained as to what the father character sees in this sinister, unlikeable young fellow.
3. That ghost-story nonsense tagged on at the end. I mean, really! I think as an audience, we're owed a little more credit than that.
What really broke my heart about this film is that despite dodgy accents, acting and scripting aside, the premise is excellent (which side of the net the ball falls on - although they laboured that a bit after a while). It's quite interesting in the first half too, and seems to gather pace once he's decided to do away with Miss Johansonn. But it's not long after that that the whole jalopy runs out steam, and loses direction.
Just to give you a clue as to how bad I think this film is - I watched it when it came out at the cinema - and I still feel slightly cheated over 18 months later. At the time, after the first hour I tried to get some sleep, thus trying to ensure that although my money had been wasted the rest of my time would not. I couldn't sleep. I was too angry.
On the sunny side it features the excellent Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton, and I'd say that's about the only reason I gave it a "2". Even that however would not be enough to make me want to watch this film again. I doubt torture would be enough to persuade me to waste anymore time on this film.
In seven words - "stick to films about New York Woody"