Do you remember Nick Of Time? It was a Johnny Depp movie, in which our hero had 90 minutes (shown in real-time) to save his daughter.

It was a concept. Regardless of the film's quality, it always had this concept going for it. As it turned out, the film was lame and the concept couldn't sustain the audience interest.

Although Yes is a different film entirely, there is a concept involved that is somehow designed to help the film avoid being, well, boring.

Alas, like the Johnny Depp vehicle before it, it stalls as soon as you open the garage door and find out what's inside.

The concept on this occasion regards the use of rhyme in the script - the whole cast speak in rhyming couplets, for the whole movie.

Joan Allen is a bored housewife (referred to as 'She' in the cast list), married to Sam Neil's rich businessman. The union is clearly not going well, as the cleaner points out in the opening monologue – one of the film's few highlights.

During a rich-man's dinner, She bumps into a suave looking fella from the middle east, who is referred to - get this - as He.

The pair exchange numbers and soon embark on a passionate affair.

But this is not just a love story. Indeed, this is a post 9/11 rant from Brit writer/director Sally Potts. She uses several key scenes in the movie to allow her protagonists to argue until they are blue in the face over the differences between the Arab and Christian worlds.

Unfortunately, the rhyming couplets do little to help her cause. When you're listening to the dialogue, you spend more time trying to guess what could possibly rhyme with the word 'dove' rather than actually paying any attention to what's really being said.

The scenes in the restaurant kitchen, where He verbally spars with two not-so-bright kitchen hands are the most effective, almost reminiscent of a Mike Leigh movie.

Sally Potts, however, resorts to cheap tricks to pad the movie out, such as intrusive and irritating uses of strobe camera shots.

But let's face it. This is pretentious stuff. Alright, so the performances are strong and the lines, however annoying they are, are delivered with conviction.

Yet good performances cannot sustain a movie with little point other than to massage the ego of the person that wrote it.

"I called it Yes because I think it's the most beautiful word in the English language," explained Potts after a screening at the London Film Festival.

Righty-ho.

Sally Potter once had a hit.
But it turned out her next film was... not very good.

Rich Phippen