Working Title should be ashamed. It’s embarassing to come out of a film and know that I am smarter than the combined IQ’s of everyone involved with the film. What’s even more surprising is that this film is directed by Beeban Kidron who, amongst others, has directed "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" and "Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps And Their Johns". She should be humilated by the film : it has the artistic content of a Pot Noodle.

Every character is a cliché. Every setpiece is predictable, vacous, and at least a third of the movie seems intent on playing up to every cliché about Thailand, Thai Ladyboys, Thai Prisons, and Thai Women in a way that is embarassingly racist. It’s like watching a Japanese film set in England where everyone has bowler hats and speaks rather posh, sir.

Quite what she is doing directing this racist, cliched piece of vacous shit I don’t know. An embarassing and illtimed trip to Thailand sees Bridget locked up in chokey - it’s no spoiler to the plot, as she stupidly  carries some statue given to her mate through customs, the fucking idiot - and the Thai prison is depicted as a laugh-a-minute singalong, as she leads a cast of anonymous slanteyes through a chorus of "Loike A Wurgun, ooh"*, trades bras for cigarettes, and all those nasty weird chinks speak perfect Engrish (apart from the fact that every 'L' becomes an 'R'), and moan about being forced into prostitution by their hobbible hobbible men. Haven’t they seen Midnight Express?

(a Madonna song, apparently)

The rest of the film sees a bunch of emotionally constipated Englishmen faffing around, a few moments of cringeworthy ‘comedy’ that is not  funny, merely embarassing in extremis, so much so that I wanted to leap  through the screen shake the characters and scream at them STOP BEING SUCH A FUCKING CLICHED IDIOT. These aren’t characters : they’re shallow one-dimensional ciphers designed to move the plot on in  predictable fashion. Look at Hugh Grant playing the immensely likable cad, Renee Wotsit fretting about all manner of crap, Colin Firth as a typical repressed Brit frustrated by convention, and then there’s
the awful, bolted-on, jarring crap lesbian crush which seems both so utterly incredulous and so fake -controversial it seems to be shoehorned in from a
completely different film altogether.

Even the English are subject to Miramax’s Fun-With-Stereotypes cliches. It rains everywhere, you can see London Bridge from everywhere. And every Englishman is an emotionally constipated buffon. Nothing like being  typecast by idiots. The biuggest crime is that the scriptwriters for this waste  of celluloid are British : they know better, yet are content to reduce their entire nation to cliches. And I really hope that someone breaks Richard Curtis’ heart Hard. So that he stops writing this flimsy, useless, middleclass fluffy tosh.

Hugh Grant is fantastic mind you. (Now that’s a sentence I never  thought I’d write). And the fight scene near the end is absolutely brilliant : the  most realistic depiction of two men having a crap,running-away-in-chickenshit-wimpness fistfight I’ve ever seen. If the film had the same level of realism as this one scene - which seems to belong to a  diffent film altogether, a good one.

One of the biggest crimes of "The Edge of Reason" is it’s soundtrack. At one point, fed up of the insidious, relentless use of MOR artists chosen solely for their ability to shift copies of the soundtrcak CD, I left the cinema,and after five minutes, I came back to the same montage of moody shots of Renee to some hopelessly ill-chosen song by a big selling,  dull soul songstress. The next scene features another ten second blast of Yet Another Song, before cutting quickly to another scene, with Yet Another Song. It’s embarassing. Even more embarassing than the closeup shot  where the obviously underpaid makeup artists fail to cover Bridget’s errant  acne (which moved from shin to cheek to forehead in the same scene), and which looked like a blind person let loose with foundation and a feltip pen. You know a film’s bad when you end up watching the make-up, or some guy who doesn’t think he’s being filmed walking like a faux-spastic in the background.

More than once, I had to restrain myself from shouting BULLSHIT at the screen as yet another incredulous, ridiculous and predictable setpiece unfolded around me in it’s full, sad, undignified glory. Make no mistake, if Working Title made this film so they could fund the making of decent movies that are not racist, cliched pieces of shit, it’s still too high a price to pay. It’s the worst British film I have ever seen.

The Edge Of Reason? The End Of Talent more like.

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