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INVESTMENT EXTRA: Spotting the Budget stars
A boneshaker that rattles but fails to roll
By
Christopher Tookey
Last updated at 12:02 PM on 2nd July 2010
Skeletons
Verdict: Depressingly lifeless...
Rating: 
Written and directed by first-timer Nick Whitfield, this desperately wants to be a quirky, surreal comedy along the lines of movies by Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie).
If only it had a fraction of their wit and invention. The film starts off with very sub-Tarantino dialogue. The stoatlike Davis (Ed Gaugh) and lumbering, bear-like Bennett (Andrew Buckley) bicker about Rasputin and the Kennedys on their way to work.
Lifeless: Skeletons stars Ed Gaugh, Tuppence Middleton and Andrew Buckley
Though they look like travelling salesman, they are in fact 'extractors' who help people in Middle England come to terms with their hidden secrets.
Their sci-fi explorations are achieved with a dodgy-looking gadget, a couple of stones and a minimum of special effects.
Imagine Ghostbusters re-made on the budget of a home movie. The extractors' boss, known only as The Colonel (Jason Isaacs), is always warning them not to get involved with their clients, but they break the rules for a housewife (Paprika Steen) who hasn't seen her husband for eight years and whose teenage daughter (Tuppence Middleton) has been mute for the last three. What's their secret?
Frankly, it's hard to care. The extremely slow pace and repetitive flashbacks to an uninteresting past reduced the critics on either side of me to sleep. The sounds of snoring elsewhere in the auditorium suggested they were far from alone.
In the context of a comedy that sets out to be fresh and inventive, sleep is a legitimate form of criticism, and there were many moments of hope-sapping dreariness when I wished I could have joined my colleagues.
This primitive effort needed much more work on the screenplay, a director with some grasp of pace, and a budget that could have done justice to its ideas.
And yet it won the Michael Powell award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Festival - a depressing and frightening result, for anyone who cares about British film-making.
If this was the winner, heaven knows what the losers must have been like.
