There may be a halfway decent film trying to wriggle out of this mess, but as with another British disaster movie (of the unintentional kind), Crush, this film is killed by a ropy screenplay and some horribly two-dimensional characterisation. Michael Kitchen is a fine actor, but his performance here as Stephen's father is just shocking; he could probably drag the scriptwriter down the plughole with him, but either way he is not going to be a movie star if this is the sort of project he gets saddled with. Marianne Jean-Baptiste (another fine actor - when is she going to get another part as good as Secrets & Lies?) is quite unconvincing as a counsellor, in a seriously underwritten part, pretty much the only kind there is in this film apart from the two leads.
As to the two main roles, they have a few good moments, but are asked to make us believe the implausible and the indefensible by the script. The "operation" scene is laughable, which perhaps was the idea, although I would have thought we are supposed to be laughing at the horror of it all, not at the ludicrousness of the action. And when it came to the drug scenes, I confess I eventually had to fast forward through them, so embarrassing were they.
"Crush", incidentally, was almost called "The Sad Fuckers Club"; I'm sure that it was in the task of sanitising it for our protection that a good idea turned into a terrible film. I wonder if this film had a similar working title...
