Film Reviews

A Film With Me In It

• Rating:
• Director: Ian Fitzgibbon.
• Starring: Dylan Moran, Mark Doherty, Amy Huberman, Keith Allen.
• Details: Ireland / 89 mins (15A).

Out of work actor Mark (Doherty) is having an absolute mare - his rundown apartment is ready to collapse but his grumpy landlord (Allen) won't fix a thing until he gets the rent. But Mark has already spent the rent and girlfriend Sally (Huberman) isn't impressed and she's moving out. Mark thinks things couldn't get any worse, but they do - the dodgy chandelier falls and kills his wheelchair-bound brother and before he has a chance to come to terms with that, his landlord slips in the kitchen and falls, stabbing himself in the neck with a screwdriver. Damn. It doesn't stop there, however, and as the body count rises, Mark calls on his best friend - the alcoholic writer-director Pierce (Moran) - to help, which is the worst thing he could have done. This darkly comic venture, written by Mark Doherty, has a lot in common with the Simon Pegg/David Schwimmer comedy Big Nothing - it starts out silly, gets sillier and then gets ridiculous, and that can be a lot fun if bought into. Although Doherty and Moran play out nicely written characters and are fine on their own, as a duo there's no zing to their dialogue. There should be more urgency and panic to the proceedings considering the bizarre situation and the deadpan approach can be a little flat. Fitzgibbon (Spin The Bottle) seems to recognise this but his attempts to quicken the pace by underscoring every scene doesn't work. But all that's nitpicking because A Film With Me In It is a lot of fun, if you like your cast being offed in the most peculiar ways.

Review by Gavin Burke