Outsourced

Rating:

* *

Verdict:

Smart writing can't disguise the hollowness of cross-cultural comedy

A smart idea is wasted in this anodyne cross-cultural comedy of manners which pretends to address the oppressiveness of globalised commerce but shies away in favour of a twee love story and and stereotype gags.

Its main character Todd (Hamilton), is in charge of "fulfilment" (read "the call centre") for a Seattle-based mail-order firm that, in his words, "sells kitsch to rednecks". When his whole division is outsourced to India, he can avoid  being fired only by agreeing to train the new management.

Things don't go well, mainly because of his digestion and their plumbing, but even before he meets a seasoned expatriate (Pine) who tells him that "I was resisting India; once I gave in, I did much better" the story arc becomes depressingly predictable. When Todd's sharpest worker Asha (Dharker) gets a crush on him,  cultural inanities - such as the ease with which a woman, betrothed since childhood, can spend leisure time alone with a foreigner - begin to pile up.

The film's idealised India does have room for some comically authentic observations: Todd misses his lift at the airport because his driver is holding up a card saying "Mr Toad" and the taxi drivers fight over him outside. But it is not above using the Kama Sutra - a sacred text - as a running gag and in terms of the politics it hints at, the film wants to have it both ways: characters like Todd's slimeball boss (Smith) sustain a smug pretence that the film is an attack on outsourcing, but it asks us to settle for the idea that dewy-eyed love trumps national economic viability any day.

Some very smart writing - the opening and the final five minutes  in particular - can't disguise the hollowness of the whole enterprise.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Josh Hamilton, Ayesha Dharker, Asif Basra, Matt Smith, Larry Pine, Matt Smith

Director:

John Jeffcoat

Running time:

103 mins

Rating:

PG, contains low-level offensive language

Screening:

Academy