Perrier's Bounty

The makers of this Dublin crime caper should think about sending enormous thank you bouquets to a trinity of actors for sparing their blushes: Cillian Murphy, Jim Broadbent and Brendan Gleeson. All three of them are fine performers, who assemble a likable if flavourless comedy out of scraps of this and knocked-off bits of that. Murphy plays a bedsit loser who owes money (the pleasingly paltry sum of €1,000) to Gleeson's camel-coated loan shark, Darren Perrier. Broadbent is his watery-eyed dad, who shows up to announce he's dying. The knight's move plot jumps from gay henchmen to fighting dogs, the grim reaper (Gabriel Byrne, wouldn't you know), a hysterical lady farmer and a dizzy suicidal flatmate. You may have spotted the whiff of casual misogyny in the last two, which we stomach because it's appropriate to the milieu. But no, it doesn't make it big or clever.