Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I was probably about four years old when my grandfather first told me the legend of Sweeney Todd, the crazed barber who slit his patrons’ throats before having their flesh baked into delicious meat pies. The tale, while more than likely apocryphal, touches on several fears close to most people’s hearts, not the least of which is unwittingly eating a fellow human being (and worse still, actually enjoying it).

Todd’s story was adapted countless times over the last couple of centuries, but the most notable in recent times was the 1979 Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, itself based on a 1973 play by Christopher Bond. The play and musical added greater depth to the story by transforming it into a macabre tale of tragedy and revenge, and now director Tim Burton has adapted the musical into a Hollywood film.

Sweeney Todd (Burton-favourite Johnny Depp) was once Benjamin Barker, a meek and mild barber living in London with a beautiful wife and child. But when the slimy Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) coverts Barker’s wife, he frames the barber and has him transported to Australia; now, 15 years later, Barker returns to London as Todd, a man devoured by thoughts of revenge.

Alas, once in London, Todd learns from his landlady Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) that his wife poisoned herself, and from there he loses his last shred of humanity. His planned revenge on the Judge, once frustrated, transforms into revenge upon society as a whole, and his killing spree results in the perfect ingredient for Lovett’s hitherto inedible meat pies.

Once again, Burton’s involvement is self-evident: his Gothic sensibilities fit perfectly with this Dickensian London that seems to exist in the bowels of hell. If there’s a contemporary musical that Burton was born to adapt to the screen, it’s this. Unfortunately, Burton’s sense of whimsy and playfulness is (for the most part) sorely missed here. The one sequence that allows him a chance to inject the lighter part of his personality into the proceedings is “By the Sea” — a much-needed moment of respite from the grim goings-on throughout the rest of the film — but for the bulk of the running time, we’re treated to angst punctuated by copious blood-letting.

Furthermore, things really slow to a crawl during the romantic subplot between Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) and Johanna (Jayne Wisener), which only has a tangential connection to the main story and isn’t engaging in the slightest. On the other hand, Sacha Baron Cohen is delightful as the rival barber Pirelli, but, of course, his part is short-lived (no pun intended).

The curious thing about Sweeney Todd is that, for a mainstream film, the audience seems quite limited. There’s far too much blood for your average musical fan, yet far too much singing for most filmgoers willing to put up with the gore. And I must emphasise that there’s a lot of singing — hardly any dialogue is actually spoken — and the melodies aren’t particularly memorable, either. I know I’m sounding like an uneducated philistine here, but ultimately there seemed to be a lot to admire about the film but little to actually like about it. This may be one of Burton’s most accomplished films, but it’s also one of his most emotionally distant. I’ll take Ed Wood or even Sleepy Hollow over this any day of the week.

Put simply, this is Burton at his darkest and most gruesome. The craft on display is impeccable, but the film itself feels cold, keeping the audience at arm’s length. Perhaps, like Todd’s own victims, his story has been recycled for consumption that many times that the servings may seem more appetising than they really are.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

In 1981, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were two of the hottest names in town: Lucas had made American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back; Spielberg, meanwhile, had directed the blockbusters Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A film produced by Lucas and directed by Spielberg would almost certainly be money in the bank.

Enter Harrison Ford as the globetrotting archaeologist Indiana Jones in the Lucas/Spielberg collaboration Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Set in 1936, Raiders follows Jones as he attempts to retrieve the lost Ark of the Covenant (on behalf of the U.S. government) before the Nazis get a hold of it — it seems the Ark may contain the power to make any army who possesses it invincible. Along the way, he teams up with former love interest Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), who owns a medallion which could uncover the location of the Ark, and Egyptian digger and friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies).

The plot, however, serves more as a framework for a series of cliffhangers in the style of Saturday matinee adventure serials, and in that sense it’s cut from the same cloth as Lucas’ own Star Wars. For example, the film opens in the jungles of South America, and by the end of the sequence, Jones has faced tarantulas, snakes, dart-blowing natives, rivals, traitors and cunningly constructed booby traps (including the famous rolling boulder — an iconic image that encapsulates the film in only a handful of shots). As he continues to face increasing dangers in Nepal and later Cairo, each sequence seems deliberately designed to end with the audience wondering, “How will he get out of this one?!”

Like Star Wars before it, Raiders is fashioned from our collective memories of adventure movie clichés, but also like Star Wars, it doesn’t simply stitch tropes together in a haphazard fashion; instead, it synthesises elements in such a way so that the film itself becomes an archetypal example of the very genre it’s trying to ape. Raiders is as much a classic as the films it imitates.

But credit must be given to screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who took the ideas generated by Lucas and Spielberg and (remarkably) transformed them into a coherent narrative. While the space epic Star Wars was purely Lucas’ project, Raiders was a truly collaborative effort, combining Spielberg’s warmth with Lucas’ fertile imagination, and it was Kasdan’s skills as a screenwriter that unified the visions of these two men.

Spielberg’s direction is simply flawless. The film never seems too self-conscious or self-aware, so the reality of the piece (however fantastic it may seem) remains intact, but there are still enough subtle nods to the audience to keep things light and fun. The performances, meanwhile, never shatter the illusion — Harrison Ford in particular manages to create a character who is perhaps a distant relative of Han Solo and yet more intelligent, more well-rounded and much more capable of carrying a film.

The score, provided by John Williams, completes the package. Like his work on Star Wars and Superman: The Movie, Williams’ theme for Raiders is instantly recognisable, capturing the spirit of the film in a few short bars. The recurring motifs in the score evoke the required moods beautifully, and it really is hard to imagine the film working as well as it does with any other composer on board.

In fact, one suspects that by removing any one member of the team of Lucas, Spielberg, Kasdan, Ford and Williams, the film would not have been the creative success that it was. Remove Kasdan and you end up with the Indiana Jones sequels, which, while fun and entertaining, either felt muddled or rehashed; remove Spielberg and you potentially end up with Return of the Jedi (although Irvin Kershner served a similar function to Spielberg on The Empire Strikes Back, also resulting in greatness). But put these five men together and you’re almost assured a masterpiece.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is about as good a popcorn movie as they come. There are no grand themes being explored here (besides, perhaps, the human lust for power and the consequences of hubris — an oldie but a goodie), but in any case, the film’s function is one of pure entertainment, and that it overwhelmingly achieves. That it manages to maintain a respect for the intelligence of its audience all the while is an accomplishment in itself.

Babel

The human condition spans continents, uniting us despite the gulfs created by distance, language and culture — this is the theme of Babel, the last film by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga. At least, that’s what I think the theme is, yet despite a nearly two-and-a-half hour running time, I’m still not quite sure.

The film follows four (sometimes tenuously) connected stories. In the first, a Moroccan goat farmer gives his two young sons a rifle in order to defend the goats from jackals. The second sees a nanny and housekeeper take her two young (white) charges across the border from the U.S. to Mexico in order for her to attend her son’s wedding. The third story has Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett holidaying in Morocco when Blanchett’s character is suddenly shot through the window of a tourist bus. (See where this is going?) Finally, in Japan we’re given the story of a deaf teenager whose disability isolates her from her peers, resulting in a kind of confused, desperate form of sexual aggression.

There is no doubt that, technically, Babel is an excellent film. The performances are all stunning and González Iñárritu’s ability to place the audience within each environment means that the jigsaw puzzle presented is never confusing or disorienting. His respect for each culture shines through, and there’s a real sense of credibility to the overall flavour and atmosphere presented.

The stories themselves as individual pieces, meanwhile, are all quite gripping and somewhat suspenseful. Individual scenes, when taken in isolation, are fine vignettes that are colourful, dramatic or simply tragic, and at first it’s hard not to be swept away. Yet where Babel fails — and this is crucial — is that the whole seems less than the sum of its parts.

There’s a kind of pretentious attitude that runs throughout the film, as if there is some grand statement being made. But what is the real message here? That life is random and tragic? That suffering unites us? These sentiments are more trite than profound, and as each character is shuffled into position for another devastating blow to occur, the end result is one of rather transparent emotional manipulation.

Nonetheless, Babel is well made and well acted. It works best if you don’t actually stop to think about the point being made, instead allowing yourself to be enveloped by its textures. If nothing else, it sustains its lengthy running time.

Blade Runner

1982 was a good year for science fiction on film: on the one hand you had Steven Speilberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which was one of those inescapable blockbusters that was as much an event as a film; on the other hand we were given John Carpenter’s The Thing, which seemed to be the cinematic inverse of Spielberg’s offering. Transcending that dichotomy, however, was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a futuristic film noir that is arguably the most important science fiction film of the 1980s — certainly, it was one of the most influential.

It is Los Angeles in 2019, and within the urban decay are four rogue “replicants” — sophisticated androids that are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a former blade runner — a detective charged with tracking down and “retiring” (i.e. killing) rogue replicants — and he’s brought back on the job to retire the current four who are still on the loose.

Blade Runner is an important film for a number of reasons. Firstly, it helped to define the “cyberpunk” subgenre: its world was a grimy, sprawling urban landscape fused with high-tech industry, and this became the paradigm upon which so much science fiction was later built. Secondly, its themes of humanity, creation and the nature of memory are dealt with seriously but never in a heavy-handed manner. And finally, it’s yet another case of a film that was relatively unsuccessful at the time of release but whose influence was so marked that it’s now regarded as a classic almost by default.

This is the work of an auteur whose vision so dominates the film that it could never have been made by anyone else. The sets are exquisite, with the lighting and cinematography striking just the right mood for any given scene, and every shot, every frame, every cut announces that This is a Ridley Scott film. This is the sort of cinematic experience whose images linger long after the credits roll — if one word describes Blade Runner, it is “haunting”.

There are, however, flaws that cannot be ignored. There is a rather detached feel throughout that keeps the audience at arm’s length, and this is only compounded by the romance between Rachel (Sean Young) and Deckard, which is never quite convincing. The love scene in particular is rather awkward and (it could be argued) borders on being a rape fantasy. Still, these are minor quibbles when examining the film as a whole.

The most interesting twist in the Blade Runner saga is that now, 25 years after its initial theatrical run, comes Scott’s so-called “Final Cut”, itself 15 years after the apparently misnamed “Director’s Cut” of 1992. This is, without a doubt, the definitive version of the film, combining the best qualities of the prior cuts while subtly tweaking areas that still needed some attention. Never do the changes feel gratuitous (unlike the special editions of certain other beloved science fiction films of the era), although some are still radical if you’re comparing this to the 1982 theatrical cut: as with the Director’s Cut, Ford’s voice-over narration is missing, and the unicorn dream is still included. Both alterations are, in my opinion, for the better, but purists should note that the theatrical cut is available on DVD with certain Blade Runner boxsets.

Ultimately, then, is Blade Runner — in any cut — a perfect film? No. Is it a great film? Yes, and already that sets it apart from most other films released in the intervening years.

American Gangster

Early in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Russell Crowe’s character, a New Jersey detective, discovers almost $1 million in unmarked bills in the trunk of a car. Does he take the money? If he does, he’s entering into the murky world of corruption that the bulk of his colleagues seem to inhabit; if he doesn’t, he’s putting himself in immediate danger because, as his partner observes, “Cops kill cops they can’t trust.” He decides to turn in the money anyway.

On one level, American Gangster is the true story of the rise and fall of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a self-made man who became Harlem’s heroin kingpin in the 1970s by directly importing his product from Thailand and cutting out the middleman. Lucas was a true entrepreneur, applying a ruthlessly capitalistic philosophy to the drug trade — he undercut the competition (who just happened to be the Mafia) by offering twice the quality at half the price.

On a deeper level, however, the film is about police corruption. Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian seem to contend that dirty cops are even worse than the criminals they bully. Washington’s Lucas adheres to his own (albeit twisted) code of ethics — he will snap quickly and mercilessly at anyone who betrays his trust, but he only does what he thinks he needs to do in pursuit of his business goals. The sleazy Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin), on the other hand, has no honour, instead abusing his power in order to extort as much money as possible from the men he should be arresting. Trupo, it seems, is the real bad guy here.

Richie Roberts (Crowe), meanwhile, is caught in the middle. He’s a man who straddles both sides of the fence: staunchly moral when it comes to the temptation of corruption, he nonetheless associates with “wiseguys” after-hours because these were the friends he grew up with. Charged with tracking down the “big fish” in the drug trade, Roberts finds opposition mostly from the police who live off the kickbacks and don’t wish to see their sources of income disappear. And after all, Roberts was the man who (so legend had it) turned in $1 million in cash.

Scott’s ability to evoke the time and place in which the film is set is never out of balance, feeling both contemporary yet still of its time. The soundtrack is excellent, but the costuming in particular is a key part of the narrative: Lucas eschews the gaudy ’70s pimp-style outfit (a “clown suit” he remarks at one point), instead preferring a suit and tie in order to remain low-key. A distinction is clearly drawn between Lucas — a businessman who dresses appropriately — and the hedonists who simply wish to live (and die) to excess.

The performances are excellent. Washington is both charismatic and menacing as Lucas, while Crowe’s turn is more understated than usual but still passionate under the surface — his most surprising scenes are where Roberts fumbles in courtrooms due to his fear of public speaking.

What separates American Gangster from many other films in the genre are the parallels drawn by Lucas (and by extension, Scott and Zaillian) between American-style capitalism and his methods of drug distribution. At one point, he even discusses branding and trademark infringement, citing Pepsi and General Motors as examples. This was a forward-thinking businessman in an unconventional business.

This is perhaps not Scott’s best film, nor the best in the history of gangster/crime films, but it’s certainly one of the better examples of both.

27 Dresses

At their worst, romantic comedies display an utter contempt for their target demographic, assuming that any woman seeking out a rom-com isn’t particularly interested in genuine wit or insight — it’s essentially porn for the girly set. (A similar argument can be made for the action genre, mind you, with the genders switched.) 27 Dresses, while still following the conventions of genre, nonetheless never feels like it’s pandering or condescending to its audience.

Katherine Heigl plays Jane, a woman obsessed with the idea of marriage despite living out the cliché of “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” — she’s got all 27 bridesmaid dresses to prove it. She is, of course, secretly in love with her boss, the cool-but-bland George (Edward Burns), but when her superficial younger sister Tess (Malin Akerman) arrives and cluelessly snaps him up in a whirlwind romance, Jane is inevitably called upon to plan their wedding.

Meanwhile, James Marsden is Kevin, a cynical journalist stuck writing for the sappy “Commitments” column in the New York Journal, and he sees writing a biting piece on Jane (the archetypal “lonely bridesmaid”) as being his ticket to gaining legitimacy. Ostensibly following Tess and George’s wedding, Kevin gradually gains Jane’s trust despite them both being philosophically at odds when it comes to the ethics of the so-called “wedding industry”.

Many critics have complained that 27 Dresses doesn’t go far enough in savaging the fleeting yet excessive conspicuous consumption of modern weddings, but at what point, then, would the film still function as a romantic comedy? The purpose here is not to create a pointed critique of flashy but ultimately empty wedding ceremonies — that task is for a different movie — but instead to give its audience a charming and witty (but still conventional) example of the genre while still making several very valid observations through the mouthpiece of Kevin. That Heigl’s character balances this with a degree of romantic idealism is not a bug — it’s a feature. (The fact that the film has been marketed as being “From the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada” does create certain expectations, however.)

While Burns isn’t particularly charismatic despite being set up as an object of unrequited desire, Heigl and Marsden carry the film along with real chemistry; Heigl’s knack for comedy in particular keeps things fun and light but not frivolous. A scene involving Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets”, while, again, seeming to come straight from the rom-com playbook, still feels fresh and energetic because the leads are just so fun to watch.

Ultimately, 27 Dresses is a standard (but well-made) romantic comedy elevated by engaging leads and smart dialogue. If you’re looking for a romantic comedy to see, you could do much worse than this — after all, you could be watching P.S. I Love You instead.

P.S. I Love You

Hilary Swank is a talented actress, winning an Oscar not only for her performance in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, but also as the transgendered Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. Why she’d choose to then star in such a tepid romance as P.S. I Love You is a mystery right up there with the meaning of Stonehenge and the reason why Travolta never made Battlefield Earth 2.

The film opens with a protracted intro featuring an argument between apparently-in-love couple Holly (Swank) and Gerry (Gerard Butler) over a comment Gerry made to Holly’s mother earlier that evening. Rather than establishing how right for each other this couple is, this scene merely sets up the characters as being rather unlikeable and one-dimensional. The whole thing comes off as rather cliched.

After the opening credits, we find out that Gerry has since died of a brain tumour, and by the end of the first act, it’s been revealed that he’d created a scheme whereby Holly will receive a series of letters from him “beyond the grave” over the coming months. These letters, of course, are designed to ease Holly out of her grief and into a new life.

The main problem here is that the theme of dealing with grief isn’t really addressed in any kind of meaningful way. Sure, Holly’s mother (played by the always dependable Kathy Bates) admonishes her for not getting on with life, and Gerry’s letters at least get her out and active again, but Holly is so passive throughout that I didn’t ever feel that she really dealt with her sense of loss so much as coasted through it.

In the context of the story itself, the letters from Gerry actually seem strangely cruel. Although they do get Holly to participate in life again, it’s life with the spectre of Gerry hanging over it, whether it be a round of karaoke (just as she’d once done while he was alive) or a trip to his homeland of Ireland.

Of course, the real reason for the letters is to allow flashbacks detailing the romance between Gerry and Holly. It’s the transparency of this contrivance that lets the film down the most, and yet it’s the whole hook of the story.

This isn’t a bad film — it’s just rather flat. But with so many better films out there, I can’t see any real reason to recommend this one.

Pink Floyd The Wall

In late 1979, Pink Floyd released their double-LP concept-album The Wall, a satire and diatribe that savaged the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle while including pot-shots aimed at a sadistic education system and the personal effects of war. This was bassist Roger Waters’ baby, being as he conceived of the project in isolation and wrote the bulk of the material on the album.

In tandem with the recording of The Wall were plans to create an elaborate stage show and concert film, and while the stage show went ahead, the film began to take on a different role. No longer would it be a concert film supplemented with additional dramatic footage starring Waters; instead, Bob Geldof was cast as the lead and the film would feature no actual footage of the band. Gerald Scarfe (who had illustrated the album and provided animations for the stage show) would remain the animation director, however.

The film itself, directed by Alan Parker (Fame, Midnight Express), is a pretty sombre affair. Geldof plays Pink, a rock star burnt out by excess and facing a gradual psychological meltdown, obviously still traumatised by the death of his father in World War II as well as possessing various other gripes. Pink eventually turns completely inwards, building a metaphorical wall as a defence mechanism and developing an utter contempt for the adulation of his fans.

Of course, very little of this is told in a strictly literal fashion. For the most part, the visuals help illuminate the soundtrack (and vice versa), creating a symbiosis of artistic purpose that communicates through the surreal imagery of Scarfe’s animations and Parker’s live-action interpretations thereof.

Where Pink Floyd The Wall fails is that the live-action sequences often seem devoid of any irony. Whereas the album had a kind of self-mocking playfulness to it, the film takes itself far too seriously, particularly since many of the themes are the stuff of teenage angst.

Yet Scarfe’s animation is what ultimately saves the project. “Goodbye Blue Sky” and “What Shall We Do Now?” are particularly memorable, as is the iconic moment of the marching hammers in “Waiting for the Worms”. If the rest of the film were this good, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Notably, Waters and Scarfe had strong disagreements with Parker on his ultimate vision for the film, which perhaps helps to explain the disparity in tone.

I’ve seen the footage shot for the original concert film, and I can’t help but feel that, had things progressed along that course, a more artistically successful film would have resulted. As it stands, Pink Floyd The Wall is a flawed classic that contains enough greatness to make it worthwhile.

Brazil

Quite a few films have a behind-the-scenes history of power struggles and “creative differences”, but only a select few enter lore as being films that almost devoured their creators. Apocalypse Now is one such film; Brazil is another.

Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, who had previously directed Time Bandits and Jabberwocky, set about to create his own 1984. Gilliam’s vision was of a twisted, distorted version of the present, occupying a space and time given only as “Somewhere in the 20th Century”, but looking like a totalitarian future as envisaged from the perspective of post-war Britain. The oppression is palpable, lead not by a menacing “Big Brother”-type but instead by a bureaucratic system determined to justify its own existence.

Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a man content to live out his life working in the bowels of the bureaucracy, supplementing his day-to-day drudgery with Icarus-like fantasies where he flies through the clouds and rescues the woman of his dreams. When Sam actually encounters (quite literally) “the woman of his dreams” (played by Kim Greist), he soon discovers the impact that poorly-managed governmental systems can have on ordinary people.

Every inch of the world of Brazil emphasises the irony that the things we rely on to improve our lives often end up hindering us more than helping. This is a high-tech society, yet the technology intrudes upon and complicates life — giant ducts snake through buildings to deliver the “goodies” of modern life, while telephones resemble old-fashioned switchboards, requiring the user to fumble around with cords and connections in order to communicate with others. Similarly, the voluminous paperwork required in order to achieve anything of worth means that the simple matter of air-conditioner repair becomes a major operation that will take days (if not weeks). “Heating engineer” Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) decides to work outside the system and is branded a “terrorist” for his troubles.

As detailed in Jack Matthews’ book The Battle of Brazil, Gilliam faced his own struggles against (what he felt was) heartless bureaucracy when he went toe-to-toe with Universal President Sid Sheinberg. Gilliam was fighting to retain final-cut rights on the film, but Sheinberg wanted a complete overhaul of Brazil, essentially removing the entire third act and thereby radically altering the film’s tone and themes. Its US release was delayed indefinitely, leading to a very public, very ugly tussle between the writer/director and the studio — at one point, Gilliam even took out a full-page advertisement in Variety in order to pressure Sheinberg into giving his film a US release. When Brazil won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, Universal’s hand was forced and the film saw release in the US in late 1985 (10 months after its UK release).

Did Brazil deserve such accolades? Some felt at the time that the LA critics were more enamoured by the “David and Goliath” struggle of Gilliam versus Sheinberg than by Brazil itself, but the passing of 22 years gives us a fresh perspective. Putting aside the politics of its production, Gilliam and co-writers Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown made a modern classic filled with wit and insight into the absurdities of our ordinary lives. Brazil is a dark film whose tension is derived mostly from the juxtaposition of slapstick and screwball comedy with dramatic and shocking scenes depicting the horrors of this totalitarian state. The only escape from a world so lacking in compassion, it seems, is through the creation of a fantasy life within your own imagination.

But even if the world is cruel, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity,” as Hanlon’s Razor so succinctly puts it. Evil exists not so much in the hearts of men as in the incompetence and pedantry of faceless bureaucracies — this is the true message of Brazil.

Hope Springs

Mike Nichols’ The Graduate was a great film — a classic, even — that was based on a novel by author Charles Webb. Hope Springs is also based on a novel by Webb, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this movie might be anything other than barely passable.

Colin Firth plays Colin, a British artist who arrives in the small town of Hope, Vermont after being unceremoniously dumped (or so it seems) by his fiancée, Vera (Minnie Driver). There he meets “free spirit” and part-time alcoholic Mandy (Heather Graham). Mandy’s unstable, erratic personality leads, of course, to Colin quickly falling in love with her.

But wait! Here comes Vera to confuse and tempt Colin away from the borderline-psychotic Mandy. What’s a guy to do?! Luckily, Vera is so shallow and one-dimensional that Colin’s decision is essentially made for him by the brain-dead screenplay.

And that’s a key problem here: characters behave in certain ways when the story demands it, yet in other ways totally contrary to reason if that is what’s required at the time. Colin’s romance with Mandy is sudden and quite random, for example, and all we’re given in the way of insight is a “quirky” initial meet-up and a montage with a dreadful cover of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” — this, mind you, should be a pivotal sequence, not some throwaway with a soundtrack that conveniently fades out during the lyric about the “nasty stain” on the wall.

There is not one character that isn’t incredibly aggravating in some way, and what little comedy there is feels forced and obvious, though I did maybe get one or two slight chuckles out of it despite myself. Oliver Platt somehow manages to salvage his scenes and give the audience some respite from the relentless mediocrity on display, but he’s hardly in the film, so it’s really a moot point.

The pacing, meanwhile, is glacial just by virtue of the fact that nothing of interest occurs onscreen. Not only is there nothing surprising or unique about Hope Springs, it’s not even competent as a purely cynical, by-the-numbers romantic comedy. Writer/director Mark Herman (Brassed Off, Purely Belter) really has no one to blame but himself for just how inept the film is, though the utter lack of chemistry between Firth and Graham doesn’t help matters, either.

The best I can say about Hope Springs is that I didn’t find it particularly offensive — just bland, badly made and totally uninvolving. I’d expect this quality from a cheap telemovie at most. How any of the actors were roped into this project is anyone’s guess.