A Bunch Of Amateurs

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

The cast is better than the material, but it's a good giggle.

The fact that this fitfully amusing comedy was chosen for the annual royal film performance tells you much of what you need to know: the Queen and Prince Philip were so impressed that they asked for a DVD to show the family at Sandringham over the Christmas break.

Pitched at about the same level as

Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War

, it's a perfectly inoffensive ensemble piece, unspoiled by the fact that the outcome is entirely predictable by about the 10th minute.

Reynolds, in a gently self-mocking performance, plays ageing action star Jefferson Steel, who is scratching for work since his latest film (deliciously entitled

Ultimate Finality IV

) bombed. His agent (Durning, looking about twice as old as his 86 years) has problems of his own, but tells his client he's scored him

King Lear

at Stratford.

We know straight away that it's not

that

Stratford. Stratford St John is a small village in Suffolk (though the film was shot in Hampshire and the Isle of Man) and its struggling amateur theatrical society is staging the great tragedy as a fundraiser. The length of time it takes Steel to cotton on (his "limo" is a muddy Land Rover and there's no minibar in the B&B) suggests he may be stupider than he looks, which is hard to credit. "I don't recognise any of these people," he whispers to the director. "Where's Judi Dench?"

You just know that the villagers and the VIP are going to end up adoring each other and the story that takes us there is sweetly old-fashioned (though a jarring and gratuitous outburst of profane language will alienate the target audience).

It's set in an England which exists, one suspects, only in American filmscripts, but what the heck? It's a good giggle even if, for the most part, the talent seems bigger than the material (particularly Bond as the fraught director, Staunton as Steel's landlady and Jacobi as the doyen of the local thespians).

Reynolds, by contrast, may not have had to work too hard to look like a man out of his depth. Even towards the end, when Steel is meant to be an excellent Lear, his lines bear only a passing resemblance to Shakespeare's.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Burt Reynolds, Camilla Arfwedson, Imelda Staunton, Charles Durning, Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond

Director:

Andy Cadiff

Running time:

96 mins

Rating:

M (offensive language & sexual references)