Sunday 10th October 2010

Looking for Eric

Director: Ken Loach
Year: 2009
Stars: Steve Evets, Eric Cantona, Stephanie Bishop, Gerard Kearns, Stefan Gumbs, Lucy-Jo Hudson

A warning: there's lots of swearing in this film. I didn't actually notice this until about half way through, when Dan (who wasn't watching the film, but was listening) went "there's a lot of beeping beeping in this film isn't there?). And certainly from that point on (at least), yes, there was. Although the lead character did, in fairness, have quite a lot to swear about by this point.

Steve Evets is Eric Bishop, a man who left his first wife and has been left by his second wife (leaving two teenage stepsons behind - they become quite important to the plot). He starts to find life hard to deal with when his daughter asks him to meet his first wife in order to look after his granddaughter, and this is when Eric Cantona starts appearing in his bedroom. Up until this point, and for the first two thirds of the film, things are going well. I cared about Eric and his life - the only thing that annoyed me was the bits where Cantona showed up. He mumbled, his brief stints made no difference to the plot, and well, he was just annoying and entirely irrelevant quite frankly.

But then the film does a bit of a left field, and in the final third you're left with a bizarre surrealist ending that doesn't sit with the rest of the realism (although it does make for an annoyingly happy Hollywood ending - again, something the film doesn't need), and an awful lot of swearing. I guess at least you didn't leave the film thoroughly depressed (Harry Brown anyone?) - well, at least not because of the story. I was fairly depressed at a basically rubbish ending to what could have been a very enjoyable film.

Rating: 3 out of 5