The Parole Officer (Cert 12)

by CHRISTOPHER TOOKEY, Daily Mail

Summer has already brought us one British caper movie, in Mel Smith's High Heels And Low Lifes. Here's another, and it's better - but, as Eric Morecambe might have added, not a lot.

Steve Coogan plays Simon Garden, a probation officer so annoying that his co-workers in Blackpool petition to have him sacked.

Instead, he's moved sideways to Manchester, where he witnesses a gangland strangling carried out by an extravagantly bent copper (Stephen Dillane).

Under suspicion of committing the murder himself, Garden recruits three former clients who have gone straight and miraculously transforms them into a gang capable of robbing a high-tech bank.

They commit this highly dangerous, completely unlucrative crime out of the goodness of their hearts, to help our hero retrieve a closed-circuit TV tape recording of the murder that has been hidden in a vault by the copper's gangland accomplice. (Why didn't the bad guys just destroy the tape? Don't ask.)

As if all this wasn't unlikely enough, Garden is wooed and won by a glamorous police constable (Lena Headey) with an all-over, Californian tan (in Manchester?). She alone seems to find him attractive and non-irritating, which is another of the plot's wilder implausibilities.

Fortunately for the nice gang, just when it is on the verge of capture, up pops a deus ex machina, in the form of a mysterious master-criminal (Omar Sharif) and his elegant wife (Jenny Agutter), whose motivation and methods are even murkier than the rest of the characters'.

This is a frustrating film, because Coogan is a talented comedian with his own style - a kind of petulant awkwardness. The script - by Coogan and Henry Normal - has enough funny ideas to make you laugh out loud several times.

It's mostly amiable entertainment, and the Australian John Duigan directs competently. But the plot has far too many holes, and hardly any of the would-be comic ideas are thought through.

For instance, one of the prospective gang-members works in a funfair, so Garden has to accompany him on a rollercoaster ride. During this, our hero throws up - not once but three times - over some pretty girls behind him.

This sequence has already been hailed a comedy classic by one arbiter of modern taste, the film critic of Loaded magazine, and some connoisseurs of gross-out humour may find the act of vomiting funny per se, and all the more hilarious when it is done three times.

The vast majority of people, however, will find it revolting, and feel sorry for the girls over whom the hero is vomiting so copiously and unapologetically.

The annoying thing is that the sequence could have been made funnier and far more sympathetic if the pretty girls had treated Garden badly in order to grab the best seats on the rollercoaster, thus making his vomiting a form of involuntary revenge.

The film-makers haven't bothered to use the central character's strengths and weaknesses to drive the plot forward credibly, nor do they ground the events in psychological or criminal reality.

The whole movie looks like a botched, mechanical attempt to weld together the cruel, mechanistic slapstick of the Pink Panther movies to the warmer, Ealing tradition of The Lavender Hill Mob.

It's significant that Coogan's character is not a parole officer at all (that's an American term) but a probation officer.

The film-makers are obviously making this movie for export, in the hope that it will launch Coogan on the other side of the Atlantic.

It won't succeed, not least because Simon Garden comes across as an unattractive loser without the genuine ability to recruit a gang, plan a bank heist, or get the girl. The only example of a British comedy this lazy being commercially successful in the cinema is Bean, and that was on the basis of the character's previous familiarity through TV with international audiences. Coogan hasn't had that kind of success.

There have been many worse Lottery-funded movies, but it's still sad to see millions of pounds being squandered on a film with such a poverty of ambition.

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