DOIN ME HEAD IN

REVIEWS - HEADRUSH: BACK in 1994, when we still ate our own young, all Irish films were about crones in shawls or IRA men falling in love with the vicar's daughter. Shimmy Marcus, a young director who later made a fine documentary about the professional eccentric Aidan Walsh, set out to write a script that would speak to his own generation.

Years later, Headrush, a passable amalgam of Ealing comedy and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, finally slopes before a greatly changed Ireland. We have, in the last few years, been deluged with TV series and films in which young men with silly nicknames - enemies of comically violent hoodlums and anybody who works in an office - act like buffoons while girlfriends tut and cluck. Rather than breaking new ground, Headrush now seems part of a genre as vibrant and dangerous as the drawing-room comedy.

Which is not to say the picture doesn't have its pleasures. Shot with bold clarity by Owen McPolin, Headrush has something of the quality of a Tex Avery cartoon about it. Characters bellow and gurn - Stephen Berkoff's Scottish hard man suggests the Tasmanian Devil playing Gordon Ramsay - while the amusingly broad sound design drops in springy boings to suggest points at which we might choose to laugh.

It's difficult to dislike a film unpretentious enough to punctuate a biff on the head with the sound of tweety birds. But, sadly, no amount of zip and zing can compensate for the picture's tortuous contrivance or its apparent belief that there is something inherently amusing about the rituals and vocabulary of recreational drug use.

Charlie (Wuzza Conlon) and T-Bag (Gavin Kelty) - the first charming, the second dopey, both feckless - live in elegant decay three doors down from Withnail's Dublin digs (it seems). When Charlie's dole is stopped, thus threatening his relationship with the sensible Vicky (Laura Pyper), the boys hatch a scheme to get hold of a stash of cocaine. The details are too unlikely to go into in depth, but suffice to say that whacky villains are rubbed up against, comedy transvestites pout and the squares get fed hallucinogens (boing!).

Notwithstanding a deeply peculiar snatch of dialogue about where the jobs go in modern Ireland, Headrush remains a harmless diversion made with notable brio. The resourceful producers are to be congratulated on rustling up an impressive roster of celebrity cameos: BP Fallon, Amanda Brunker and Huey Morgan from Fun Lovin' Criminals all pop their heads in. But the enterprise ends up feeling rather old. And that is not the same thing as grown-up.