(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-29 10:04

Directed by Jonathan Gershfield, starring Mackenzie Crook, Colm Meaney

This could have been a satire of a spiritually dead London where urban wage-slaves grind back and forth to work on a crumbling underground system, crammed into carriages with, in TS Eliot's words, "only the growing terror of nothing to think about".

Instead it's just another depressing, mediocre, muddy-looking British film that wastes an awful lot of talent.

Mackenzie Crook plays Paul, a depressed London subway train-driver who has two people fall in front of his train in a single week. His colleagues whisper that there's an unofficial "three- and-out" rule: If three unfortunate souls wind up under his wheels within one month, he gets pensioned off with a mouthwatering lump-sum of 10 years' salary.

So Paul sets out to find someone who wants to commit suicide: He will give them a cash advance on his future payout and they can live it up for one last weekend before chucking themselves under his train.

The scene removes, bafflingly, to the touristy-picturesque locale of the Lake District (did funding depend on this?) where we meet Tommy's long neglected wife, played by Imelda Staunton - too good for this nonsense. Their grown-up sexy daughter Frankie is played by Gemma Arterton, who does lots of catwalk posing in her beret and is more wooden than all the Woodentops combined.