PLUNKETT AND MACLEANE

by Lev David

I had high expectations. The trailer was positively stunning. The website was hip to the hilt. The poster wasn't too bad either. I should've known they were trying to hide something. 

So what went wrong? Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller (previously seen together in Trainspotting) provide the cool. Liv Tyler adds marketability. And director Jake Scott (son of Ridley "Alien" Scott) has had an impressive career directing music videos - at the very least there should've been an interesting visual angle. Unfortunately, it's rather like a party where the in-crowd pitches up, the music is playing, but nobody gets up to dance. 

Indeed, the music, a funky mix of techno and old-world jazz played against such backdrops as decadent 18th century English balls, is one of the few good things about this production. That, along with some remarkable period re-creation, creates some interest. 

The rest, however, is thoroughly disappointing. Carlyle and Miller just don't make enough of an effort. As a director, Scott turns in an uninteresting debut. While he does employ some visual techniques which are atypical for the genre, like super-fast zooms and music video style editing, these are so rare and oddly positioned that you have to wonder what the point is. 

Ultimately, though, the real villains are scriptwriters Peter Barnes and Charles McKeown. At any given moment there's something on screen that we should be terribly interested in - highway robberies, horseback chases, public hangings. But the characters are so dull, the dialogue so lukewarm and the humour so tired that even all this comes across as utterly boring. 

And so, even when the visuals move at breakneck speed, the film as a whole lacks momentum. At 93 minutes, it's an overlong, unentertaining waste of time. 

CineScene, 1999