It's been a long time since a sprightly Christopher Plummer led the family Von Trapp across the Alps and out of the clutches of the Nazis.
Since that iconic high the Canadian star - despite award-snagging turns in A Beautiful Mind and The Insider - has never really banished that vision of the Austrian navy captain strumming Edelweiss and badmouthing the Bosche.
Dickie Attenborough's dimwitted Closing The Ring gave him the opportunity to play a self-pitying soak - a portrait he takes to its whisky-sodden extreme here.
He is Flash Madden, a former Hollywood gaffer who worked on Citizen Kane but is now reduced to slurring insults at the silver screen after severely denting a bottle of Wild Turkey.
It's while shouting abuse during a matinee at a Beverly Hills fleapit that Flash first meets film fanatic and college rebel Cameron Kincaid (Angarano).
He's intrigued by this plastered pensioner who - between pie-eyed rants - reveals a encyclopaedic knowledge of classic cinema.
Flash, it seems, is just the chap to help Cameron out with his student movie about a motorbike cobbled together from vacuum cleaner parts.
The answer is simple: head off to a Hollywood retirement home full of greying film folk and put the creaking production crews back to work again.
Funnily enough, 53-year-old director Michael Schroeder's over-cute collision between The Player and Cocoon does have the feel of a student film about it.
He employs an annoying cinematographic style known by people who should know better as "snazzy shooting". However, it comes across as someone with attention deficit order.
It's not a bad idea until sub-plots about abuse of the elderly, Flash's film mogul nemesis Robert Wagner and some tosh about freeing compound dogs into the wild overbalances the whole dodgy apple cart.
Plummer mugs furiously as the cantankerous old git crying out for cirrhosis and it's up to the likeable Angarano to make proceedings barely palatable.
By the end it's lost any edge and is as soft and unappealing as a geriatric incontinence pad.
Tim Evans
|
