Breaking the Bank * (2016, Kelsey Grammer, Tamsin Greig, John Michael Higgins) – Movie Review

Something has gone wrong – well, quite a few things – with Vadim Jean’s well-meaning, good-hearted Britcom, reuniting him with Kelsey Grammer, the star of his 1998 comedy The Real Howard Spitz.

Warm and appealing TV favourite Grammer tries so hard to be funny as the Sir Charles Bunbury, bumbling chairman of a family-run British bank that faces the predatory attacks of ruthless US and Japanese investment banks, that his failure to raise laughs is heartbreaking. Roger Devlin’s struggling screenplay is to blame.

It starts with good intentions and goes down the way of the proverbial road. It’s even a comedy with a timely subtext (greedy bankers), some interesting characters and a bit of warmth. But, with four other writers credited for additional writing (including Jean), you’d think it could be a whole lot better than this.

Accessing Penelope Keith, Tamsin Greig gives her caustic posh lady act a full workout as Sir Charles’s unpleasant shrewish wife, and she gets the best of what funny lines are going in the film, so that’s OK. But John Michael Higgins as the smarmy American takeover king Richard Grinding, Mathew Horne as cockney wideboy slick trader Nick, Sir Charles’s treacherous right-hand man, and Pearce Quigley, as Oscar the savant muddled vagrant Sir Charles falls in with, are really not good. But then the roles they have to play are not good either.

The London location filming (plus shooting at Dorking town centre, Bearehurst country house and at Black Hangar Studios, Hampshire) is very smart and slick, making it a good-looking, proper movie, though the lazy use of IPC Media/Time Inc UK’s overused, Blue Fin Building, Southwark Street, London, for both exteriors and interiors is getting a tiresome feature of too many movies now.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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