REVIEWED - FAKERS: A quiz: what are the most depressing words in British or Irish film? How about "If you don't have the money by Friday my boys will . . . " The scenario in which a loveable rogue has a certain amount of time to come up with a certain amount of money before a certain amount of damage is done to his kneecaps is now so familiar that the phrase above has acquired the power to fairly freeze the blood, writes Donald Clarke.
In this drab, weightless Brit flick, the villain is Art Malick and the cheery geezer is the once promising Matthew Rhys. The inevitable crazy scheme involves repeated faking of a 100-year-old Italian drawing and hawking the resulting copies round a series of antique shops staffed by the sort of character actors - Rula Lenska, Jonathan Cecil - more often seen recumbent, dagger in trachea, in the herbaceous borders of Midsomer Murders.
To continue with the theme of twee British TV, Fakers comes across as a sketch for an outline for a first draft of a tentative proposal for an episode of Lovejoy. Though some money seems to have come via Daimler-Chrysler, whose Smart Cars are promiscuously featured, it defies all reason that any producer should green-light something so reed thin.
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