Review of Starter for 10 (2006) by Gareth R — 06 Jul 2010

Here's your starter for ten: name ten interesting things about this movie. As I sat and watched it, waiting in vain for the story to come alive, I struggled to remember what it was about the trailer that caught my interest. Oh, right: Mark Gattis is in it. Other than that - and really, he's not in many movies - it's a pile of conventions and clichés. It is allegedly a comedy, but there arenâ??t many laughs. Why label it as such, then? The answer, I think, is the same as all tepidly unfunny "comedies": take away the genre label, and what's left isnâ??t good enough to pass for drama. It's anecdotal at best, and it gets by solely on the quirk of where and when it is set.

A guy goes to university in the mid-'80s. He meets two women: a flirty pink princess and a pretentious Save The World post-modernist. He dates one of them for the majority, while we wait patiently for the other to return to the fray. He gets on the University Challenge team, and things don't go terribly well. Then he gets the girl (go on, guess which one, I'll wait), and it finishes with the kind of clichéd conclusion you've heard a thousand times. Not one bit of it set alight.

Perhaps it would be more enjoyable with a better main character. James McAvoy plays Brian, who struggles with a wonky Cockney accent. (He's from the seaside and he goes to Bristol University, so where he picked up the local dialect of Eastenders remains a mystery.) He has two no-good mates, but wants to "know everything", which means going to university and potentially becoming - as his friend puts it - a wanker. On his arrival at university, where he meets Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), who's all No Nukes and lofty opinions on the meaninglessness of love, I'm inclined to think his friends were right to worry. Anyway, Brian gets good at quizzing, then bad at quizzing, then good at quizzing again. Yawn. Somewhere along the line, his mother (Catherine Tate) starts seeing another man, as her husband (Brian's Dad) died years ago. Brian is apparently uncomfortable with this, although not much is made of this in the script. He's just not very consistent, or likeable. Stuff happening, stuff happening. Get to the point.

The drab drama trundles along, mostly without laughs (so the trailer and reviews seem misleading) and without incident. What does happen is just plain obvious, and you sit waiting for it. Yes, it has one of those Richard Curtis-ey endings, where the music cranks up a gear, and our hero narrates something like: "And then, suddenly, I realised! I'd been in love all the time, but with the other one!", and races to kiss the woman he suddenly loves, they embrace, camera pulls out, fade to black. Boring.

The novel's popular, so fans of that will probably enjoy it. I was convinced it must be based on a true story, so trite and uneventful it was, but apparently no: someone made all this up. As usual in these situations, I'll charitably assume the filmmakers buggered up all the good bits, because what's left on screen, i.e. the coming-of-age story of an unlikeable snot, is not page-turning stuff. Also, tastes may vary, but most of us probably don't want to return to the '80s. Having said that, I do like a bit of The Cure, and this film has a lot of it.

Anyway, for the three of you who are interested, Mark Gatiss is in one scene. Catherine Tate's very good, though. She should be in more.