harris-s

The real question about this film, is how it ever got to be made. The narrative line is disjointed and confusing, after all, why is a talking rabbit driving a white van, why does the mum, Sally Philips, have an American accent, albeit as bad an American accent as Dick Van Dyke's cockney one, yet the husband is clearly English, though for no good reason, a spaced out wide boy/failed pop star. As for the kids - it's not quite clear where they were brought up, except possibly somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Then what is the strange animal in the cage and why is Harry Enfield even in the film. There's Richard E.Grant, once again compensating for an apparent lack of direction by extravagantly overplaying an otherwise formless character - and Jerry Hall, barely acting any more than she did as Lady Jagger - the pair apparently delivering a formidable fusillade of the golf balls with machine gun rapidity and accuracy - thus confounding the villains for all of two minutes. And what about Vinny Jones, as the tooth fury - one moment like the villain who screwed Gazza's nuts, and the next a mewling soft touch for the none too cute juvenile leads.

This dreadful farrago must have cost millions of pounds to make - I don't recall it making any impression on initial release, let alone making it out on to general release - and it should not have been hard to ascertain the total lack of potential at the script stage and saved everyone a lot of money, and spared the rest of us an excruciatingly awful film.